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Facultatea de Jurnalism i tiinele Comunicrii Universitatea din Bucureti

Specializarea tiinele Comunicrii


Nivel licen

TEXTS OF COMMUNICATION (II)

Titular de curs: Lect. Dr. Ruxandra Boicu

Acest material este protejat prin Legea dreptului de autor i a drepturilor conexe nr. 8 din 1996, cu modificrile ulterioare. Dreptul de autor i aparine Lect. Dr. Ruxandra Boicu Facultatea de Jurnalism i tiinele Comunicrii, Universitatea din Bucureti, are dreptul de utilizare a acestui material. Nici o parte a acestui material nu poate fi copiat, multiplicat, stocat pe orice suport sau distribuit unor tere persoane, fr acordul scris al deintorului dreptului de autor. Citarea se face numai cu precizarea sursei.

TEXTS OF COMMUNICATION (II)

INTRODUCERE

Cursul Texts of Communication II este continuarea cursului n limba englez de pe semestrul I (Texts of Communication I), pentru studenii din anul II, ce aparin seciilor de Jurnalism, Relaii Publice si Publicitate. Primul tutorat este destinat problematicii interaciunii verbale. Se va insista pe caracteristicile interaciunii n textele monologale i n cele dialogale. Dialogul va fi comparat cu conversaia pentru a desprinde trsturile definitorii ale prototipului interaciunii orale. De asemenea, studenii se vor familiariza cu analiza conversaional i cu terminologia de specialitate n acest domeniu. Cel de-al doilea tutorat cuprinde unele teorii clasice i moderne ale actelor de limbaj i ale schimbului verbal (convenional i neconvenional). Ultimul tutorat prezint studenilor teoriile politeii i pe cele mai recente ale impoliteii, subordonate teoriilor mai ample privitoare la activitatea relaional. Se va arta c cea din urm este determinat de normele comportamentului lingvistic al utilizatorilor. Nu n ultimul rnd, se accentueaz pe relaia ntre cadre le cognitive ale comunitilor de practici, intenia communicativ, emoii i im/politee. Studenilor li se propun teme de reflecie pe marginea textelor originale din bibliografia de specialitate, teste de autoevaluare tip gril, precum i teme de verificare ce presupun crearea unor texte proprii care s ilustreze teoria. Tot n aceast categorie de teme, studenii vor analiza producii reale din domeniile pentru care se pregtesc. Evaluarea final va lua n considerare calitatea temelor pregtite de ctre cursani.

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Unit 1
LINGUISTIC INTERACTION Contents

1.1

Introduction

1.1.1 Monologal vs. dialogal discourses 1.1.2 Monological vs. dialogical discourses 1.2 Definitions

1.2.1 Creeses Contribution (2008) 1.2.2 Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) 1.3 Linguistic interaction at work (Sarangi 2005)

Objectives (Unit 1)

At the end of this unit, the students will be able to: Distinguish among the various types of linguistic interaction Participate in the production of better texts of communication Analyse linguistic interaction both in dialogues and in monologues Observe the generic features of the texts they will produce as professionals in communication

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1.1 Introduction
In interaction, we are interested to observe the negotiation of meaning. Actually, to emphasize the process of meaning making. Likewise, we attempt to interpret degrees of coherence, given the fact that there is no text without coherence. Relationally, we will analyze the respective shares of consensus and disagreement in the relationships between the participants. With Francis Jacques (1988), the dialogue is a comprehensive type of interaction. Dialogue is characterized by the following features: It is an exchange of ideas between the participants The participants have a common goal (deliberative) The participants collaborate in sense making

In the same theory, dialogue is differentiated from conversation. While a conversation relies on an internal phatic function, the dialogue is articulated by the external function of the exchange of ideas. Important forms of dialogue based on disagreement are the controversy and the confrontation. The latter are goal-oriented, while deliberative forms of dialogue, such as the debate, have a semantic function (meaning searching) In a more recent theory of interaction forms, Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1996) shows that the dialogue and the conversation are the main structures of linguistic interaction. Unlike Francis Jacques, Kerbrat-Orecchioni considers the conversation is more comprehensive than the dialogue. The main types of converations are the discussion (semantic function) and the dispute (goal-oriented). The interview, as a variant of the debate (important information for media genres and public communication), is subordinated to the discussion, if it has a deliberative function. NOTE: The translation from French into English of the categories and classifications of the interaction forms is a literal one. In the original, in French, the categories are closer to the Romanian significance of the terms. There may be differences in the way they are used in English.

1.1.1 Monologal vs. dialogal discourses

The smallest unit of the monologue is the intervention (French specialized literature). It corresponds to one turn-taking (AngloSaxon specialized literature). It contains at least one main 5
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argumentative act, supported by various subordinate justifying acts. The intervention/turn-taking is made up of at least one speech act. The minimal unit of the dialogue is the adjacency pair (two turns taken by two participants in the linguistic intervention). The most interactive linguistic exchange consists in a questionanswer interaction. Questions may or may be not satisfied by the expected answer (Moeschler 1985).

1.1.2 Monological vs. dialogical/dialogismal discourse The monological discourse contains/presents only one point of view/universe of beliefs: the speaker expresses her/his individuality, guarantees the semantic content of the utterance. The dialogical discourse presents more than one points of view/universes of beliefs within one intervention/turn-taking. The speaker cites (either directly or indirectly) at least one different point of view and starts a a more or less explicit dialogue with the latter. The dialogue may voice agreement or disagreement of the speaker with the cited points of view. It is the expression of accepted or rejected alterity. Dialogism/dialogicism contributes to the argumentative, rhetorical value of the text.

1.2 Definitions
The notion of interaction is omnipresent today in the various works that are attempting to restore to linguistic exchanges their social or micro- social dimension, or to provide a linguistic dimension for conceptions of the social bond that lack it ; this notion inevitably encounters the themes of enunciation, dialogue, language intersubjectivity, and linguistic sociality, the systemacity of which is problematic. The article therefore attempts, in an essentially exploratory and programmatic way, to place in question the widely accepted idea that formal linguistics - the linguistics which descends from Saussure and Chomsky - only came into being by radically repressing these questions. Symptomatic is the fact that Benveniste and Jakobson alluded to (without further developing) the necessity of shifting the traditional transcendental framework of linguitics towards a fundamentally intersubjective one. It is suggested that, starting in the last third of the 19th century, one can find traces of a broadly transdisciplinary cognitive interest organized around two main themes; these latter the study
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endeavors to define. What is on the one hand the question of interior language, which, moving from V. Egger to Benveniste, and from psychology to linguistics, opens up the field of an intramental space in which the dialogic and the dialogal interconnect. On the other hand there is the theme of the linguistic essence of sociality, which is represented in a particularly suggestive way in G. Tarde's rough sketch of an analysis of conversation ; here, through, the metaphor of the link , that is, in the terms used by H. Kelsen, the spatialization of inter-psychic phenomena, the relationships between psychology, sociology and linguistics are partly played out. In addition to the research orientations suggested here, the idea of a clear-cut division in the linguistic tradition between an abstract rationalism and an unprincipled empiricism, should doubtlessly be reconsidered. The dynamic of certain recent works, whether they associated with symbolic interactionism (Goffman) or with a pragmatics of the third kind (Berrendonner), suggests that the future of the notion of interaction will depend as much on the ability of theoreticians to accept the history of their cognitive interests, as on the rigorousness and inventiveness with which they will succeed in formalizing the experience of speaking subjects within the community.[] (Chiss and Puech, 1989: 7) 1.2.1 Creeses Contribution (2008) The debate about what is and what is not distinctive to an understanding of linguistic ethnography is current and the term linguistic ethnography itself is in its infancy. On the one hand it positions itself very much alongside anthropological traditions to the study of language, such as the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1968, 1972) and interactional sociolinguistics (IS) (Gumperz, 1972, 1982), while on the other hand, it claims a distinctiveness by keeping the door open to wider interpretive approaches from within anthropology, applied linguistics and sociology. Linguistic ethnography typically takes a poststructuralist orientation by critiquing essentialist accounts of social life. In conjoining the two terms linguistic and ethnography it aligns itself with a particular epistemological view of language in social context. In a recently published discussion paper on linguistic ethnography, its general orientation is described as follows: Linguistic ethnography generally holds that language and social life are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in everyday activity. (Rampton et al., 2004, p. 2) The discussion sets out an epistemological position which has much in common with contemporary sociolinguistics more generallyan interest in the interplay between language and the social, the 7
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patterned and dynamic nature of this interplay and the processual nature of meaning-creation in the making of context. (p.229) 1.2.2 Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) Another tradition within LA [linguistic anthropology] is interactional sociolinguistics (IS), which focuses on discursive practice in social contexts and considers how societal and interactive forces merge. The goal of IS is to analyse how interactants read off and create meanings in interaction. Because language indexes social life and its structures and rituals, language use can be analysed to understand how presuppositions operate in interactions. Moreover, IS has looked at how interactants use language to create contexts. An important concept emerging from IS is contextualization cue, which according to Gumperz describes how a sign serves to construct the contextual ground for situated interpretation and thereby affects how constituent messages are understood (1999, p. 461). IS is often concerned with intercultural encounters and the systematic differences in the cultural assumptions and patterns of linguistic behaviour which are considered normal by those involved. Gumperz and others (Ochs, 1993) in their empirical work show how when we speak, we have ways of conveying to the listener complex information about how we intend them to treat the message. Ochs argues, . . . in any given actual situation, at any given actual moment, people in those situations are actively constructing their social identities rather than passively living out some cultural prescription for social identity . . . (Ochs, 1993, p. 296, 298) In Gumperzs crosstalk studies the focus is on how people of differing cultural backgrounds make assumptions about the kind of speech event they are participating in. The aim is to show how individuals participating in such exchanges use talk to achieve their communicative goals in real life situations by concentrating on the meaning making processes and the taken-for-granted background assumptions that underlie the negotiation of shared interpretations (Gumperz, 1999, p. 454). A main purpose of IS analysis is to show how diversity affects Interpretation and in this respect, it has much in common with microethnography and the work of Erickson (1990, 1996). (p. 231) Authors Reference [selection] Gumperz, J.J.: 1972, Sociolinguistics and communication in small groups, in J.B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 203224.
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Gumperz, J.: 1982, Discourse Strategies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gumperz. J.J.: 1999, On interactional sociolinguistic method, in S. Sarangi and C. Roberts (eds.), Talk, Work and Institutional Order, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 453471. Gumperz, J., Jupp, T., and Roberts, C.: 1979, Crosstalk, BBC/National Centre for Industrial Language Training, Southall, Middx. Ochs, E.: 1993, Constructing Social Identity: A Language Socialization Perspective. Research on Language and Social Interaction , Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates,Hillsdale,NJ. Rampton, B.: 1998, Speech community , in J. Verschueren, J. Ostman, J. Blommaert, and C. Bulcan (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics , John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

1.3 Social interaction, social theory and work-related activities (Sarangi,


2005) [T]he three key concepts social interaction, social theory and work-related activities are very much interwoven and it is this intersection that has formed a central tenet of my recent work (see, in particular, Sarangi and Roberts, 1999; Sarangi, 2001a, 2004a, 2005; Sarangi [in press]). The interrelationship between social interaction and social theory constitutes the age-old micro-macro dilemma. While a commitment to social interaction requires us to focus our analytic lens on micro-level activities, a social theoretical motivation concerns the uncovering of the overall influence of macro-level social structure on our everyday actions and identities. It is now commonly accepted that the relationship between social structure and social interaction is a dialectic one. This is very well captured in Giddens (1984) concept of structuration as a way of resolving the structure-action dualism. However, from a linguistic anthropology viewpoint, Ahearn (2001) critiques Giddens notion of structuration which is not only a recursive loop (actions influenced by social activity analysis structures and social structures (re)created by actions), but also pays little attention to the role language plays in maintaining social practices and in bringing about social change. It is worth noting that workplace activities are not reducible to language/interaction and that changes in workplace-related communicative practices are mediated by social theoretical concerns such as power, knowledge, equity, and justice. The interactionist turn in social and human sciences

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Let us take a cursory look at the debate concerning the primacy of interaction within the social and human sciences (for a recent overview see Atkinson and Housley, 2003). A starting point, for our purposes, is Blumers(1969) model of symbolic interaction, which was primarily a reaction against a deterministic view of the social world, with a heavy reliance on causal explanations. According to Blumer (1969, p. 11-12): The position of symbolic interactionsim is that the worlds that exist for human beings and for their groups are composed of objects and that these objects are the product (p. 160) of symbolic interaction The nature of an object of any and every object consists of the meaning that it has for the person for whom it is an object. Blumers views about interaction are conceptualised as an alternative to materialism by denying the existence of phenomena in their own right. There is the suggestion that interaction and sense making cannot be reduced to rule-like behaviour. Viewed from this perspective, symbolic interactionism can be regarded as a precursor to social constructionism. Other interactionists such as Mead and Simmel would distance themselves from such extreme symbolism and recognise the existence of social phenomena in their own right. Glassner (1980, p. 22-23), however, considers Blumers position as being idealistic, and goes on to propose what he calls essential interactionism which consists of events, states, phenomena and processes: Interactions may be described as processes made up of phenomena within various events, which at each point make up states amid other states. The notion of alignment is crucial here: it is based on a view of interaction as jointly produced with all participants being actively involved in the production of action at all times. In a seminal paper, Stokes and Hewitt (1976) suggest that aligning actions encompass two meanings: (i) how individual conduct accords with that of co-participants in the creation of social acts; and (ii) how problematic situations involve discrepancies between what is actually taking place in a given situation and what is thought to be typical, normatively expected, probable, desirable or, in other respects, more in accord with what is culturally normal (1976, p. 843). The expression culturally normal can be loosely interpreted to include what is situationally relevant and appropriate, but not in a deterministic way. Wilson (1971, p. 60) characterises this trend of interactionism as a shift from the normative paradigm in which interaction is viewed as rule-governed in the sense that an observed pattern of action is rendered intelligible and is explained by referring to rules in the forms of dispositions and expectations to which actors are subject. For Wilson (1971, p. 67), within the interpretive paradigm, unlike the normative one, interaction is an
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essentially interpretative process in which meanings evolve and change over the course of the interaction. Against this backdrop we need to consider the perspective on social action as not only at the heart of phenomenology (Schutz, 1964) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), but also what characterises Goffmans call for the study of social interaction in its own terms. Goffman writes: My concern over the years has been to promote acceptance of this face-to-face domain as an analytically viable one a domain which may be titled, for want of any happy name, as the interaction order (Goffman, 1983, p. 2). The interaction order for Goffman goes beyond the everyday meaning of face-to-face encounters. He makes a distinction between interaction order to mean interactional practices and the traditionally conceptualized elements of social organisation in the sense of social structures and goes on to capture the linkage between these two domains as loose coupling (Goffman, 1983). One may argue that such a loose coupling is what Giddens tries to embody in his notion of structuration. In making a case for the study of the neglected situation (i.e., social interaction), Goffman issues a challenge to linguistics. In relation to his notion of footing, he writes: linguistics provides us with the cues and markers through which such footings become manifest, helping us to find our way to a structural basis for analyzing them(Goffman, 1981, p. 157). As Tannen (1993) points out, Gumperzs (1982) theory of conversational inference is one such response. In addition to contextualisation cues working as a signalling mechanism for negotiation and shifts in frames and footings, other pragmatic notions such as presupposition, intentionality, implicature, coherence, indexicality are intricately embedded in Goffmans (1974) frame analysis. As far as discourse and communication researchers are concerned, interactional notions such as footing, framing, and inferencing are not so straightforward to identify and interpret in a given workplace setting without the benefit of insiders insights this is what I have elsewhere called the analysts paradox (Sarangi, 2002). This raises particular questions about the positioning of the analyst in looking for patterns of similarities and differences across interactional trajectories within a given professional/institutional setting. The members method in ethnomethodology is not without difficulties. For instance, who does qualify as a member of a group? How does the analyst gain access to the tacit knowledge a member might draw upon in managing his/her conduct in a given encounter? However, this call for participants insights should not be equated with post-hoc accounts provided in research interviews, because (p.161) participants themselves may not have easy access to the tacit knowledge that underlies their 11
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communicative performance. Following Schutz (1964), Garfinkel (1967) holds that background expectancies are the natural facts of life, although an individual may be at a loss to tell us specifically of what the expectancies consist. Likewise, Polanyi points out that the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them (Polanyi, 1958, p. 49). NOTE: Bakhtins (1986) project in dialogicism can also be seen as an exercise in interactionism. The basic unit utterance is not reducible to an objective meaning outside of their communicative environment. The notion of addressivity is never exhausted, as anticipated responsive reactions are considered part and parcel of ones individual style. In a similar vein, Voloshinov (1987, p. 99) suggests that the context of the utterance must consist of three factors: (1) the common spatial purview of the interlocutors (the unity of the visible); (2) the interlocutors common knowledge and understanding of the situation, and (3) their common evaluation of that situation. In any case, members inhabiting an interpretive community of practice are guided by a set of vague norms which are partially open to adaptation in every situation of use. Garfinkel (1967) refers to this vagueness of norms as the etecetera property, which accompanies every norm: Use this norm appropriately, even if it means behaving in contradiction to the norm. (See the example of no smoking in an auditorium, but how this does not apply to the actors on stage who may be required to smoke as part of the character they are portraying on stage; the No smoking sign will then be read as No smoking, etc.). This observation attests that our own interpretation of institutional/professional discourse will, by default, be ad hoc and in need of further negotiation/validation. This is the main reason why the processes of interaction cannot be coded objectively using a sophisticated system such as Bales (1950) interaction process analysis. A second point follows from this: our understanding of the nuances of interaction will be enhanced by thick participation in the lives of the research participants and by undertaking analysis of entire workplace activities in order to satisfy what Cicourel (1992) calls the conditions of ecological validity. Revisiting the tensions within social theory when making sense of social interaction In this section I briefly recapture the tensions involved in applying social theoretical perspectives in a top-down manner to workplace interaction. These observations are drawn from a recently published paper (Sarangi, 2001a) which makes an attempt to understand the dynamics of a psychotherapeutic interaction from the perspectives of Foucault (1970, 1972), Habermas (1970, 1987) and Bourdieu (1991). The clinical encounter concerns a male
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patient (in his early thirties) who is a media professional, with a genetic disorder that can result in blurred vision, leading to blindness, and for which there is no cure. Although social theorists like Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu draw upon language in their theorisation of social structure and individual agency, they do not actually analyse language data to show the relationship between the micro- and macro-contexts of interaction. For instance, Bourdieus critique of speech act pragmatics is a convincing one: the meaning of what is said depends crucially upon the status and role of the speaker in a given social milieu. However, Bourdieu himself does not undertake any detailed linguistic or interactional analysis to demonstrate this (see Mehan [1983] on the role of language and the language of role in team meetings, although not directly ensuing from Bourdieus observation). The psychotherapeutic interaction I analysed in detail seemed to be organised primarily around coping or emotional adjustment, with elements of explanatory understanding, progressive learning and self-reflection. I conclude as follows: [T]he micro-macro debate in social theory finds a useful outlet in language as a mediating force. As we have seen, Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu, in their own ways, have all taken language to fill out the micro-macro divide/link Despite their different orientations, they share a view of language as social action. This is borne out by the fact that their theoretical insights can be mapped on to the interactional plane, in different but cumulative ways. There should be a word of caution in that the mappings I have attempted do not necessarily count as proof of the individual theoretical positions. In any case a data site such as the psychotherapeutic clinic should not simply be regarded as a test bed for social theory (Sarangi, 2001a, p. 54-55). Let me now turn to the final component of the triadic puzzle signalled in the title of this paper work-related activities. I will explore this topic in relation to the notion of expertise in the health care setting. I shall argue that in the ever-changing healthcare domain, the notion of expertise also undergoes transformation both at the level of substantive, scientific knowledge (the what dimension) and at the level of procedural knowledge (the how dimension). I will suggest that workplace interaction is a form of expertise (Sarangi, [in press]), with inevitable variations across settings and client circumstances. Workplace expertise as knowledge-in-interaction There is a strong tradition of workplace interaction studies, from a variety of analytical perspectives, located in a range of professional and institutional settings (for an overview, see Sarangi and Roberts, 1999). Of particular significance are the 13
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ethnomethodological studies of organisations and professions (Lynch and Sharrock, 2003). Generally speaking, workplace practices are constituted in socially embedded communicative activities, comprising not only text and talk but also other modalities. As Gellner aptly puts it: Work, in the main, is no longer the manipulation of things, but of meanings (Ernst Gellner, cited in Stehr, 1994). This view suggests the significance of interaction (as a system of intersubjective meaning making). Such (p. 162) meaning making practices cannot be divorced from wider societal factors. The redistribution of skills and knowledge is central to what Gee et al. (1996) refer to as the new work order. The historic shift from the industrial worker to the knowledge worker does coincide with micro- and macro-level discoursal shifts. Gee et al. (1996) suggest several tendencies which characterise the postmodern workplace. Central to this is the proliferation of low-paying jobs, the valuing of diversity, the dispersal of centralised authority and hegemony, and the wider distribution of knowledge within and across local communities of practice (Gee et al, 1996, p. xiii). The new work order creates a set of core values e.g., equality, trust, collaboration, quality and the workers, as partners in a flat hierarchical system, are expected to share the vision of the employer they work for. Worker empowerment thus amounts to taking full responsibility and remaining accountable for what they do (not) achieve. Such tensions between institutional and professional modes have a societal basis, but are routinely experienced at the interactional level (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999). Is this new work order accompanied by novel interactional trajectories? It is possible to argue that patterns of participation/interaction in a given workplace will change in keeping with the societal transformation (Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1996). The barriers of asymmetry may be normalised through the deployment of different linguistic and discourse strategies in work-related tasks and responsibilities. Drew and Heritage (1992, p. 25) have suggested that setting/situation is not a definitional criterion of institutional interaction: interaction is institutional insofar as participants institutional or professional identities are somehow made relevant to the work activities in which they are engaged (see also, Sarangi, 1998). It would then follow that interactional patterns, rather than the setting itself, can be the defining feature of workplace practices. Psathas (1995), among others, draws attention to the fact that generic rules of everyday conversation cannot be applied in a straightforward fashion to workplace encounters. As Lynch and Sharrock (2003, p. xxxix) remind us:

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Although the sequential procedures that make up what conversation analysts call talk in interaction are evident in, and important for, the organisation of practices in a variety of social institutions, it is not enough to say that, for example, a jury deliberation or a medical diagnosis is an organisation of talk. Another crucial feature of the ethnomethodological studies of work is the reliance on ethnographic insights in ones attempt to understand the actual practices of those doing the work from their perspective, including their understandings of social structures (Lynch and Sharrock, 2003; see also Cicourel, 2003). Let us explore further the different components of what constitutes workplace/professional expertise/competency, and what role interaction might play within such expertise. Expertise, for many of us, equates with ownership of knowledge. As Stehr (1994) puts it, we live in knowledge societies, where experts exert knowledge-based power in all aspects of our social lives. But exactly what counts as expert knowledge and what relationship professionals as experts establish with available knowledge systems is open to debate. The professional-client encounter as a research site has remained a target of many workplace studies. The client comes to the professional because he has met a problem which he cannot himself handle (Hughes, 1958, p. 141). This underscores the fact that professionals are privy to knowledge that lay people do not have and that an interactional basis is necessary to sort out the clients problems. According to Rueschemeyer (1986, p. 166), Experts define the situation for the untutored, they suggest priorities, they shape peoples outlook on their life and world, and they establish standards of judgement in the different areas of expertise in matters of health and illness, order and justice, the design and deployment of technology, the organisation of production. This then allows for a lay-expert distinction, which is a long standing one (Sarangi, 2001b). Schutz (1964) contrasts expert knowledge and lay knowledge as follows: The experts knowledge is restricted to a limited field but therein it is clear and distinct. His opinions are based on warranted assertions: his judgements are not mere guesswork or loose suppositions. The man on the street has a working knowledge of many fields which are not necessarily coherent with one another. His knowledge of recipes indicating how to bring forth in typical situations typical results by typical means (Schutz, 1964, p. 122). Expertise, according to the above stipulation, implies an in-depth mastery of a field of knowledge. Warranted assertions can only be made within a limited field. Lay knowledge, by contrast, is not distinctly specific: it is rather typical. 15
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NOTE: In many contemporary workplaces, experts actions are mediated through expert systems. In the healthcare context, expert systems may include technologies such as X-ray procedure, laboratory-based tests, software-assisted risk assessments as well as patients case records and official forms. While advances in science and technology (as expert systems) have direct consequences for what constitutes knowledge and authority of the so-called experts, the tensions are manifest at the interactional level. With regard to the medical profession, Freidson (p. 163) (1970) points out that professional expertise is constituted in a combination of scientific/technical knowledge and clinical/experiential knowledge. As I see it, both these knowledge systems are interactive, cumulative and systematic and do give rise to an array of expert interaction systems. Much of the expert knowledge (scientific and clinical) are discernible in the interactional level in terms of systematic history taking, diagnostic reasoning, offer of explanations, use of evidence etc. In Foucaultian terms (Foucault, 1970), appropriation of discourses is an expert-knowledge activity, constituted in both the what of knowledge and the how of knowledge, although not always at an explicit level. The situated character of interaction becomes central. This is parallel to discussions about interactional competencies more generally. The proliferation of communication skills training via the undergraduate medical curricula and in-service courses in the UK especially in areas like delivery of bad news, shared decision making, evidence-based medicine is indication that health professionals do possess adequate clinical and scientific expertise. But what they lack is managing such expertise interactionally, and in accordance with various frameworks of governance (Sarangi, 2004b). Some would no doubt resist such generic approaches which can lead to potential de-skilling of specialist professionals. Here I would argue that interaction is another layer of expert knowledge in addition to the scientific and clinical dimensions and that health professionals have explicit and tacit level of knowledge about interaction in their specific professional settings. However, as Heath (1979) points out, much of the professional knowledge does not appear at the surface of interaction. She writes: First, the language of the professional set him apart from the client or patient. His language was a mark of the special province of knowledge which was the basis of what it was the patient was told, though the knowledge itself could not be transmitted to the patient. A second feature of the language of the professional was his articulated knowledge of ways to obtain information from patients while restricting the amount and types of information
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transmitted to the patient. Professionals have, therefore, been socialised to have certain perceptions of their role in communicative tasks, and they have been trained to use language as an instrument to maintain that role and to accomplish ends often known only to them in interchanges (Heath, 1979, p. 108). These are very general observations made some 25 years ago. The nature of information exchange in doctor-patient consultation has not only changed over time, but that different medical specialities come to embody different interactional trajectories when dealing with patients. Perkyl and Vehvilinen (2003) have recently drawn our attention to what they call professional stocks of interactional knowledge (SIK). By SIK, they refer to the normative models and theories found in communication text books and manuals. Quite rightly they challenge the rather simplistic conceptualisation of interaction and in the Goffmanian spirit, call for the need to pay detailed attention to the interaction process itself. However, we need to keep the text book characterisation of interactional knowledge separate from that of the professional practitioners themselves. When one speaks to professionals or becomes involved in long-term ethnographic fieldwork, one realises the complex nature of interactional knowledge which may be shared among a group of professionals. Following Polyani (1958), my concern here is with the tacit knowledge of interaction which underpins many healthcare professionals communicative conduct in situated encounters. In a recent special issue of the journal Communication & Medicine, Perkyl et al. (2005) provide a linkage between treatment theories and interaction theories. Their hypothesis is that the more tightly a professional theory of interaction is anchored to the respective treatment theory, the more potent the theory is. However, conversation analytic studies of professional interaction continue to focus on the sequential organisation of small interactional episodes. From the viewpoint of professional practice, Clarke (2005, p. 191) points out the limitations of such a narrow focus: Studies of talk-in-interaction, whether labelled as CA or DA, would align more readily with the perspective of professionals if they could examine episodes of interaction as long as the whole consultation Professionals will perhaps be more enthusiastic about collaboration if the lens used to study their activities could be switched to even a slightly lower power, so that the give and take of discussion over a longer period perhaps even during the whole of a consultation could be examined. Clarke extends the metaphor of the microscope and suggests: the analyst must steer between the Scylla of decontextualisation and the Charybdis of over-generalisation. A microscopist would remind us of the need to use a lens of appropriate magnification

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neither too high power (removing essential context) nor too low power (revealing insufficient detail) (Clarke, 2005, p. 189). This brings me to propose a framework of activity analysis which combines the micro and macro aspects of social events, and also relies on ethnographic insights in search for ecological validity (Cicourel, 1992). Towards activity analysis in work-related settings My proposal of activity analysis (AA) is theoretically premised on Levinsons notion of activity type (Levinson, 1979; Sarangi, 2000). Levinson (1979, p. 368) defines activity type as a fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded events with constraints on participants, settings (p. 164) and so on, but above all on the kind of allowable contributions. He adds: [T]ypes of activity, social episodes if one prefers, play a central role in language usage. They do this in two ways especially: on the one hand, they constrain what will count as an allowable contribution to each activity; and on the other hand, they help to determine how what one says will be taken that is, what kinds of inferences will be made from what is said. Both of these issues are of some theoretical and practical interest (Levinson, 1979, p. 393). Constraints on what can or cannot be said are closely tied up with how inferences are made in a goal-oriented action framework and what may count as a breach of social norms. The tradition of ethnography of speaking (Hymes, 1962) is a precursor to the notion of activity-type, although an early attempt worthy of the label of activity analysis is Mitchells (1957) study of the language of buying and selling in Cyrenica. Ethnography of speaking as an analytic template works well in most ritual settings. But, as Thomas (1995) observes, it is a rather descriptive framework, which lacks explanatory power and does not allow for assessing which components are more important in a given activity and the role of agency and context in the shaping of activities. In contrast, Levinsons proposal offers an explanatory framework which takes into account speaker intentionality (see Gumperz, 1982, on contextualisation cues and conversational inferencing) as well as participant orientation (see Goffman, 1981, on production and reception roles). The main strengths of the notion of activity-type can be summarised as follows: The notion of activity type appeals for various reasons: it takes into account cognitive, historical and genealogical dimensions, as it links these to interactional patterns and structural configurations. Unlike behaviourist or cognitive models which
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focus on the individual performance and mental scripts, activity type analysis removes the burden from the individual Against the backdrop of prototype theory, Levinson moves away from an either/or categorisation, towards a categorisation of entities based on more/less along a continuum. For instance, not all legal proceedings or medical consultations are conducted in exactly the same way, but there is a prototypical form from which other versions can deviate, but not without activity-specific inferences/implicatures attached to such deviations. A notion of normality is thus presupposed in activity-specific behaviour, but this does not amount to fixedness or rigidity. Deviations from the focal points only make us rethink the potential boundaries and crossings between activity types (Sarangi, 2000, p. 6-7). Drawing upon this notion of activity type, my proposal for activity analysis can be situated within discourse analysis, centred around the multi-functional, context-specific nature of language use both in written texts and in spoken interaction. The notion of context is of central significance in ones understanding of activity types both as participants and as analysts. Levinson (1997, p. 26) points to the apparent paradox that utterances can create their own contexts: If it takes a context to map an interpretation onto an utterance, how can we extract a context from an utterance before interpreting? The idea that utterances might carry with them their own contexts like a snail carries its home along with it is indeed a peculiar idea if one subscribes to a definition of context that excludes message content. The following analytic features are constitutive of activity analysis: Mapping of entire encounters, both thematic and interactional Communicative flexibility at the levels of activity types and discourse types Integration of discoursal and rhetorical devices Goffmans notions of frame, footing and face-work Gumperzs notions of contextualisation cues and conversational inference Alignment: sequential and normative Social and discourse role-relations Thick participation and thick description Activity analysis therefore has to be grounded in what I would call thick participation in the professional/institutional events, and thick description has to include both thematic and interactional mapping of whole encounters (Roberts and Sarangi, 2002; see also Gee, 1997; Green and Wallat, 1981; Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Mehan, 1979).

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When dealing with a corpus of data, Schiffrin (1987, p. 19) alerts us to two complementary kinds of analytical accountability: When an analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of the coherence in a text, we may say that it has sequential accountability. When an analysis provides an explanation of why an element occurs in one discourse environment but not another, we may say that it has distributional accountability. The sequential dimension has been the cornerstone of conversation analysis and has led to many useful insights (e.g., step-wise advice giving [Heritage and Sefi, 1992], perspective display series [Maynard, 1991]). Dealing with professional and institutional encounters, corpus-based studies have demonstrated distributional variations in interaction types (both patterns of differences and similarities). These two types of analytic accountability have to be supplemented with an attention to thematic staging and critical moments (Roberts and Sarangi, 2002, 2005) To summarise, within a framework of activity (p. 165) analysis, interactions are seen as a narrative unfolding of events and characters, organised temporally and spatially. In addition to the sequential order, rhetorical moves are also central to how events and characters are portrayed and managed in interaction (see, for instance, Goodwins 1994 general proposals about nature of salience, backgrounding and foregrounding of information). Activity analysis remains sensitive to the historical context in which institutional/professional changes and continuity are accomplished in response to a given socio-political climate. More importantly, in mapping particular episodes of healthcare interaction (e.g., delivery of bad news, shared decision making), activity analysis provides a useful bridge between micro-level understanding and macro-level explanations of workplace communication. Overall, it facilitates a division of interpretive labour in what seems to be primarily an interdisciplinary field of study. Illustrative examples Over the years, the activity analysis approach has been developed with particular reference to the medical setting (Roberts and Sarangi, 2005; Sarangi, 2000, 2004 a, 2005, [in press]). For example, interactional and thematic maps of contrastive cases bring out the differences that can lead to identifying good and bad interactional trajectories, especially in the oral medical examination context. With regard to styles of involvement, we have found that the candidate with the high score, unlike the one with the low score, not only uses more empathetic styles of asking questions and listening in distributional terms, s/he also displays
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a strategic orientation to an affiliative stance staging/sequential sense (Roberts and Sarangi, 2002).

in

the

In an ongoing study in the primary care setting in the UK, we have been exploring the patterns of interaction related to prescription and non-prescription of antibiotics. A systematic mapping of the encounters has led to identifying interactional variables: (i) consultations where antibiotics is prescribed are comparatively shorter in duration, with physical examination routines occurring earlier on in the consultation process; (ii) consultations where antibiotics is not prescribed are longer in duration, with elaborate and complex explanation and assessment of symptoms, with patients sometimes providing their own accounts of aversion to antibiotics. Let me provide one further example from the genetic counselling setting. Genetic counselling is a hybrid activity type (Sarangi, 2000), covering a range of topics such as: the natural history of a genetic disorder; levels of genetic awareness of the clients and families, and relationships within family networks; potential advantages/disadvantages of genetic testing; discerning an individual clients carrier status vs. at-risk status vs. affected status; the (un)treatability of specific conditions; decisions surrounding reproduction choices; the ethical and legal consequences of decisions made, privacy issues concerning the circulation of genetic information. In interactional terms, one would expect periodic shifts in topics, covering both medical and lifeworld domains, over an expansive timeframe that includes the past, the present and the future. Unlike many other counselling/therapeutic settings where clients take centre stage in troubles-telling, we find that in genetic counselling the genetic professionals spend a considerable amount of time explaining the causes and consequences of a genetic condition, the risks associated with knowing ones genetic status, the psychological and socio-moral issues concerning decisions to undergo predictive tests and decisions about disclosing ones test results. Let us consider the interactional maps concerning three clients in three counselling sessions (second appointments) where each client is at risk of having inherited the Huntingtons Disease [] Concluding remarks Connecting the micro to the macro in our studies of work-related activities will remain a challenge. Methodologically speaking, any analysis of workplace practices needs to steer a midway between constructionism and radical situationalism in order to avoid micro-analytic myopia (Mehan, 1991). Activity analysis, as I have demonstrated in this paper, equips us to meet this challenge, while striving towards 21
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ecological validity (Cicourel, 1992). More generally, workplace researchers will be expected to remain committed to a research site rather than to a research tradition, so that they understand work-related activities in their entirety. The challenge for discourse and communication analysts is one of moving from no expertise to discriminatory expertise, whereby they can not only provide thick description but also through thick participation contribute towards evaluation of professional and institutional practices and their intersection. Authors References (selection) BAKHTIN, M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, University of Texas Press. BOURDIEU, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, Polity Press. CICOUREL, A. 1992. The interpenetration of communicative contexts: examples from medical encounters. In: A. DURANTI and C. GOODWIN (eds.), Rethinking Context: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. CICOUREL, A. 2003. On contextualising applied linguistic research in the workplace. Applied Linguistics, 24 (3):360-373. DREW, P. and HERITAGE, J. (eds.). 1992. Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. FOUCAULT, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London, Tavistock Publications. FOUCAULT, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London, Tavistock Publications. GARFINKEL, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall. GEE, J.; HULL, G. and LANKSHEAR, C. 1996. The New Work Order. London, Allen and Unwin. GIDDENS, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge, Polity Press. GOFFMAN, E. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York, Harper & Row. GOFFMAN, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford, Blackwell. GOFFMAN, E. 1983. The interaction order. American Sociological
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Review, 48:1-17. GOODWIN, C., 1994. Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3):606-633. GUMPERZ, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. GUMPERZ, J. and COOK-GUMPERZ, J. 1982. Introduction: language and the communication of social identity. In: J. GUMPERZ (ed.), Language and Social Identity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 1-21. HABERMAS, J. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vols 1 e 2, Boston, Beacon Press. HYMES, D., 1962. The ethnography of speaking. In: T. GLADWIN and W.C. STURTEVANT (eds.), Anthropology and Human Behaviour. Washington, Anthropological Society of Washington, p.13-53. LEVINSON, S. 1979. Activity types and language. Linguistics, 17(5/6):365-399. LEVINSON, S. 1997. Contextualizing Contextualization cues. In: S. EERDMANS; C. PREVIGNANO and P.J. THIBAULT (eds.), Discussing communication analysis 1: John J. Gumperz. Lausane, Beta Press, p. 24-30. LYNCH, M. and SHARROCK, W. (eds.). 2003. Harold Garfinkel. Vols. 1-4, London, Sage. PERKYL, A. and VEHVILINEN, S. 2003. Conversation analysis and the professional stocks of interactional knowledge. Discourse & Society, 14(6):727-750. PSATHAS, G. 1995. Talk and social structure and studies of work. Human Studies, 18:139-155. ROBERTS, C. and SARANGI, S. 2003. Uptake of discourse research in interprofessional settings: reporting from medical consultancy. Applied Linguistics, 24(3):338-359. SARANGI, S. 1998. Institutional language. In: J. MEY (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. Oxford, Elsevier, p. 382-386. SARANGI, S. 2000. Activity types, discourse types and interactional hybridity: the case of genetic counselling. In: S. SARANGI and M. COULTHARD (eds.), Discourse and Social Life. London, Pearson, p. 127. SARANGI, S. 2001a. A comparative perspective on social theoretical accounts of the language-action interrelationship. In: N. COUPLAND; S. SARANGI and C.N. CANDLIN (eds.), 23
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Sociolinguistics and Social Theory. London, Pearson, p. 29-60. SARANGI, S. 2001b. On demarcating the space between lay expertise and expert laity. Text, 21(1/2):3-11. SARANGI, S. 2002. Discourse practitioners as a community of interprofessional practice: some insights from health communication research. In: C.N. CANDLIN (ed.), Research and Practice in Professional Discourse. Hong Kong, City University Press, p. 95-135. SARANGI, S. 2004a. Language/activity: observing and interpreting ritualized institutional discourse. In: L. FILLIETTAZ (ed.), Cahiers de Linguistique Franaise, 26 [special issue Les modles du discours face au concept daction]. Geneva, Department of Linguistics, p.135-150. SARANGI, S. and SLEMBROUCK, S., 1996. Language, Bureaucracy and Social Control. London, Longman. SCHIFFRIN, D. 1987. Discovering the context of an utterance. Linguistics, 25(1):11-32. STEHR, N. 1994. Knowledge Societies. London, Sage. TANNEN, D. (ed.). 1993. Framing in Discourse. New York, Oxford University Press. THOMAS, J. 1995. Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. London, Longman. VOLOSHINOV, V.N. 1987. Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art. In: I. TITUNIK and N. BRUSS (eds.), Freudianism. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, p. 93-116. WILSON, T.P. 1971. Normative and interpretive paradigms in sociology. In: J. DOUGLAS (ed.), Understanding Everyday Life. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 57-79.

Tem de reflecie 1.1


What is the difference between dialogue and conversation according to Jacques Francis (1988)? What is the relation between the interview and the debate, according to Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1996)? What is the fundamental interaction form/type with KerbratOrecchioni (1996)? What is the necessity to which Benveniste and Jakobson alluded? What is the significance of the intersection of linguistics with psychology and sociology? 24

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How can you define linguistic ethnography? What is Rampton et al.s 2004 (p. 2) view on linguistic ethnography? What is the relationship between meaning and context? What is the essence of interactional sociolinguistics? What is the double relation between language and context in interactional sociolinguistics? What is Gumpertz definition of contextualization cue? What is Ochs conception about social identity? How does Sarangi (2005) explain Ahearns (2001) criticism of Giddens notion of structuration? What is interaction order for Goffman (1983)? What is the essence of Bakhtins (1986) project in dialogicism? Garfinkel (1967) refers to the vagueness of norms as the etecetera property. What does he mean? What does Sarangi consider to be the new work order in interaction studies? What is Drew and Heritages (1992) view on setting/situation for the interpretation of interaction? What is the difference between talk in interaction and organization of practices, according to Sarangi (2005)? What is the relationship between interaction and expertise, according to Sarangi (2005)? What is the definition of the the experts knowledge according to Sarangi (2005)? What is the experts activity? What do Perkyl and Vehvilinen (2003) mean professional stocks of interactional knowledge (SIK)? by

What is Clarkes (2005) metaphor for the correct interaction at the work place? What is Levinsons (1979) definition of activity type? What are the analytic features, constitutive of an activity analysis (Sarangi 2005)? What is thick participation in the professional events (Sarangi 2005)? What about thick description?

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Test de autoevaluare 1.2


1. Turn-taking represents: a. a speech-act b. a monologue c. a dialogue 2. An adjacency pair corresponds to: a. a monologue b. a turn c. two turns 3. Dialogism/dialogicism has to do with: a. two turn-takings b. two speech acts c. two points of view 4. Monological discourse refers to: a. one turn-taking b. one point of view c. one speech act 5. Dialogue is characterized by the following features (according to Francis Jacques 1988): a. it is a phatic interaction b. it is a goal-oriented interaction c. It is an exchange of ideas between the participants

Correct Answers
1, b.; 2, c; 3, c; 4, b; 5, c;

1.3. Lucrare de verificare Unitatea 1


Find a news interview or a press conference and analyse it in terms of linguistic interaction, paying attention to the dynamic relationship between context and meaning-making.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY (Unit 1)
Chiss, Jean-Louis and Puech, Christian nonciation, interaction, conversation : les thories du langage entre le psychique et le social In: Histoire pistmologie Langage. Tome 11, fascicule 2, 1989. pp. 736. Creese Angela Linguistic Ethnography in K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education , 2008, pp. 229241. Jacques, F., Dialogiques - Recherches logiques sur le dialogue, Paris: PUF, 1979. Jacques, F., Trois strategies interactionnelles : conversation, ngociation, dialogue n J. Cosnier et al. (coord.) changes sur la conversation. Paris : d. du CNRS., 1988, pp. 45-68. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C., La construction de la relation interpersonnelle : quelques remarques sur cette dimension du dialogue Cahiers de Linguistique Franaise, n 16-17, 1995, pp. 69-88. Kerbrat-Oreccioni, C., La conversation, Paris: Seuil, 1996. Mgureanu, Anca, Le sujet en pragmatique, in Vlad Alexandrescu (ed.), Pragmatique et thorie de lnonciation : choix de textes, Editura Universitii din Bucureti, 2001 Moeschler, J., Argumentation et conversation. lments pour une analyse pragmatique du discours, Paris: Hatier, 1985. Sarangi, Srikant, Social interaction, social theory and work-related activities in Calidoscpio (by Unisinos) Vol. 3, n. 3, pp. 160-169, set/dez2005

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Unitatea de nvare 2

Unit 2

LINGUISTIC INTERACTION AND SPEECH ACTS CONTENTS


2.1 2.2

Interaction and exchanges Speech acts and moves in negotiation 2.2.1 Interactionism 2.2.2 Negotiation 2.2.3 Speech act theory 2.2.4 Classification of speech acts 2.2.5 Accumulative effect and the balance model of the speech acts

Objectives of unit 2
At the end of unit 2, the students will be able to: distinguish between transactional and interactional functions of conversation use conversational structure for producing better interviews and press conferences understand and apply interaction in monological texts, specific to their future professions learn classic and modern classifications of speech acts develop their writing skills and performance improve their interactional competence

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Titlu de curs

2.1 INTERACTION AND EXCHANGES Dialogue: A verbal exchange between two or more people. Conversation: The spoken exchange of ideas, observations, opinions, or feelings. Transactional and Interactional Functions of Conversation "[T]wo different kinds of conversational interaction can be distinguished--those in which the primary focus is on the exchange of information (the transactional function of conversation), and those in which the primary purpose is to establish and maintain social relations (the interactional function of conversation) (Brown and Yule, 1983). In transactional uses of conversation the primary focus is on the message, whereas interactional uses of conversation focus primarily on the social needs of the participants. . . . "Conversation also reflects the rules and procedures that govern faceto-face encounters, as well as the constraints that derive from the use of spoken language. This is seen in the nature of turns, the role of topics, how speakers repair trouble spots, as well as the syntax and register of conversational discourse." (Jack C. Richards, The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) Turn-taking: a term for the manner in which orderly conversation normally takes place. The underlying principles of turn-taking were first described by sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation," in the journal Language, December 1974. "Once a topic is chosen and a conversation initiated, then matters of conversational 'turn-taking' arise. Knowing when it is acceptable or obligatory to take a turn in conversation is essential to the cooperative development of discourse. This knowledge involves such factors as knowing how to recognize appropriate turn-exchange points and knowing how long the pauses between turns should be. It is also important to know how (and if) one may talk while someone else is talking--that is, if conversational overlap is allowed. Since not all conversations follow all the rules for turn-taking, it is also necessary to know how to 'repair' a conversation that has been thrown off course by undesired overlap or a misunderstood comment. Adjacency pair: a two-part exchange in which the second utterance is functionally dependent on the first, as exhibited in conventional greetings, invitations, and requests. An adjacency pair is a type of turn-taking. It is the smallest unit of conversational exchange.

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When one participant in the verbal interchange holds a cluster of multiturns, the latter is designated as an Extended Turn (ET) Monologue: A speech or composition presenting the words or thoughts of a single character. "A monologue is a predominantly verbal presentation given by a single person featuring a collection of ideas, often loosely assembled around one or more themes. (Adaptation from Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide) EXAMPLE of Interactivity in a monologue (1) Demilitarize.org March 30, 2011 Press Communique Global Day of Action on Military Spending, April 12 On Tuesday, April 12, 2011, people in more than 35 countries will participate in the first-ever Global Day of Action on Military Spending. Actions will include a protest in front of the White House, actions at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, a march in Kampala, a demonstration in Dhaka, a forum in Seoul, and much more. The Global Day is co-organized by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC and the International Peace Bureau in Geneva, Switzerland. It has been endorsed by more than 100 organizations [] .This global action coincides with the annual release of the figures for global military expenditures by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2009, the world spent more than $1.5 trillion on the military. Even in the middle of a global economic crisis, military spending has increased, with the United States responsible for nearly half of all expenditures. At the same time, other crises have put a great strain on the world's resources: climate change, earthquakes, global poverty, nuclear proliferation, and the threat of health pandemics. Ever greater funds are necessary to repair the societies that have been damaged by war and conflict, including the latest war in Libya. With five years to go, the international community will not be able to meet the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals without a substantial reordering of economic priorities. On April 12, people around the world will demand that their governments reduce military spending and devote those precious resources to pressing human needs. They will send a message that $1.5 trillion is too much. Please visit our Website http://www.demilitarize.org for more information about the Global Day, the endorsing organizations, and the specific actions. Examples of verbal exchanges:

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(2)A: Are you coming? B: Yes, I am.

(3) A: What time is it? B: Its 12 oclock. A: Thank you!

(4) A steps on Bs feet. A: Im so sorry. B: Its all right. (6) A: Who are you writing to? B: Its not business. your

(5) A: Whats the time? B: I dont have a watch.

(7) A: Will you join me to the cinema tonight? B: No, I have some work to do at home. (9) A: Will you join me to the cinema? B: To film? see what

(8) A: Will you lend me that book? B: But of course. A: Thank you so much! B:Youre welcome!

A: The Queen. B: OK, I will.

What is a Speech Act?


We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "Im sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture. Here are some examples of speech acts we use or hear every day: Greeting: "Hi, Eric. How are things going?" Request: "Could you pass me the mashed potatoes, please?" Complaint: "Ive already been waiting three weeks for the computer, and I was told it would be delivered within a week." Invitation: "Were having some people over Saturday evening and wanted to know if youd like to join us." 31
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Compliment: "Hey, I really like your tie!" Refusal: "Oh, Id love to see that movie with you but this Friday just isnt going to work." (Source: The Center for Advanced on Language Acquisition (CARLA) University of Minnesota) Research

Term derived from the work of J. L. Austin and popularized by John Searle Examples and Observations: "[I]n order to explain what can go wrong with statements we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved (whatever that is) as has been done traditionally. We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued--the total speech-act--if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go wrong. So the total speech act in the total speech situation is emerging from logic piecemeal as important in special cases: and thus we are assimilating the supposed constative utterance to the perfomative." (J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2nd ed., ed. by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbis. Harvard Univ. Press, 1975) "We use the term speech act to describe actions such as 'requesting,' 'commanding,' 'questioning,' or 'informing.' We can define a speech act as the action performed by a speaker with an utterance. If you say, I'll be there at six, you are not just speaking, you seem to be performing the speech act of 'promising.' "When an interrogative structure such as Did you . . .? Are they . . .? or Can we . . .? is used with the function of a question, it is described as a direct speech act. For example, when we don't know something and we ask someone to provide the information, we usually produce a direct speech act such as Can you ride a bicycle? "Compare that utterance with Can you pass the salt? [Here] we are not really asking a question about someone's ability. In fact, we don't normally use this structure as a question at all. . . . This is an example of an indirect speech act." (G. Yule, The Study of Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006) "Several categories of speech acts have been proposed, viz. directives (speakers try to get their listeners to do something, e.g. begging, commanding, requesting), commissives (speakers commit themselves to a future course of action, e.g. promising, guaranteeing), expressives (speakers express their feelings, e.g. apologizing, welcoming, sympathizing), declarations (the speaker's utterance brings about a new external situation, e.g. christening, marrying, resigning) . . .." (D. Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics. Blackwell, 1997)
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(Source: speech act By Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide) SPEECH ACTS (Types and examples) 1) Declaratives/Declarations: acts performed by authorized persons Examples: I hereby pronounce you man and wife! (priests) This court sentences you to ten years imprisonment. (judges) 2) Representatives: acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case, such as describing, claiming, hypothesising, insisting, predicting, etc. Examples: The fact that girls have been outstripping boys academically has been acknowledged for the past 12 years or so. (Glasgow Herald: 28 November 2000) I came; I saw; I conquered (Julius Caesar) 3) Commissives: acts in which the words commit the speaker to future action, such as promising, offering, threatening, refusing, vowing, volunteering, etc. Examples: Ready when you are. Ill make him an offer he cant refuse. (Mario Puzo, The Godfather) Ill love you, dear. Ill love you Till China and Africa meet 4) Directives: acts in which the words are aimed at making the hearer do something, such as commanding, requesting, inviting, forbidding, suggesting, etc. Examples: Better remain silent and be thought a fool, than open your mouth and remove all possible doubt. (Ancient Chinese proverb) 5) Expressives: acts in which the words state what the speaker feels, such as apologising, praising, congratulating, deploring, regretting, etc. 33
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Examples: Ive been poor and Ive been rich rich is better. (Tucker) If Id known I was gonna live this long, Id have taken better care of myself. (Blake) (Adaptation from Cutting Joan, 2002, Pragmatics and Discourse. A Resource Book for Students, Routledge) INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS (Examples) Its pretty cold, isnt it. (Representative form; indirectly, it may be a hint at turning on the heater) Im hungry. (Representative form; indirectly it may be a request for some food) Jim, mother is tired! (Representative form; it may be an order to stop making noise) Ill be 30 next Sunday. (indirect invitation to a birthday party) Ill meet you again. (promise or threat) I dont have this book. (indirect request) Dont you think thats too much? (Order under the form of a question) Will you be quiet? (order under the form of a question) Im so tired! (order under the form of an expressive act) You talk too much! (order under the form of a representative act)

2.2 Speech acts, moves, and meta-communication in negotiation: three cases of everyday conversation observed among the Gui formerforagers (Sugawara 2009)
Interactive organizations of three cases of negotiations are systematically analyzed in the contemporary ethnographic context of the Gui (Khoe-speaking Bushman people) in Botswana. The illocutionary acts that constitute these negotiations are identified, the principal of which is the requirement by one party. Another partys response includes two alternatives: refusal or obeying. When some sequence of speech acts functions as the move that affects the course of the negotiation, this move usually exerts an accumulative effect that is caused by iterating the same type of act. This hypothesis is well represented by the balance model of speech acts, rather than the billiard ball model. Apparently, a serious negotiation may be experienced as a verbal play-fight by the participants, as well as
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by the audience. This meta-communicative keying is supported by the convergence of participants attention onto the shared frame of action-coordination. If the participants hope to play jokingly, they have to continue their interaction beyond the duration necessary for the transactional goal. Linking logically consistent moves and objecting to the opponents definition of their social relationship are the best strategies for continuing a bout of faceto-face interaction. In this sense, logical consistency of speech acts is contiguous with emotional involvement in interactions. 2.2.1 Interactionism The transdisciplinary framework (see the Introduction of this issue) that the present article follows may be called interactionism. Its theoretical origin can be traced back to Goffmanian microsociology that has shed light on the ground rules for face-to-face interactions among city dwellers in various types of natural settings (Goffman, 1963). A number of strands of methodologies also stream into interactionism: Batesonian thinking regarding communication (Bateson, 1972), structural analysis of face-to-face interactions (Kendon, 1982), conversation analysis (Heritage, 1984), speech act theory, and pragmatics. Interactionism assumes that any institution is ultimately grounded on, and incessantly realized by, face-to-face interactions, or, borrowing Goffmanian terms, the immediate and embodied copresence of the participants (Sugawara 2009: 93). 2.2.2 Negotiation This investigation concentrates on negotiation, which is a particular type of social interaction that is assumed to be the most significant for human struggle for survival in every society. Consider the simplest negotiation between two individuals, P and Q. Both of them are pursuing profit, but Ps gain may entail Qs loss, and vice versa. This situation is very familiar under the headline of prisoners dilemma in politicaleconomic arguments for which game theory, optimum strategy theory, and the like are the most pertinent. These theories have paid less attention to the interactive process that any negotiation undergoes than to its outcome, which can be measured numerically. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that the rational-actor model, which plays a major role in contemporary economics and international relations (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999:515), is not a neutr al description of the world, but is based on complex metaphors that entail implicit moral choices: Most people most of the time do not reason according to the rational-actor model, nor even according to the traditional philosophical ideal of rationality as literal, formal, conscious, disembodied, and unemotional. Real human reason is embodied, 35
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mostly imaginative and metaphorical, largely unconscious, and emotionally engaged. (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999:536) Most researchers of extant/former-foragers might be sympathetic with Lakoff and Johnsons antipathy against the rational-actor model because they would note that begging is the typical pattern of negotiation most frequently encountered in these societies. It is not at all unusual that P simply requires something and Q gives it without hesitation. The classical explanation of a begging-giving interaction in terms of balanced reciprocity is merely a version of the rational-actor model in that some return from the begging party, P, is expected through a long-term social relationship between P and Q (Sahlins, 1974). The paradigm of reciprocity is also restricted by the theoretical bias that puts far more emphasis on the outcome of negotiating interactions, ideally exchange, than on their diverse processes. As an interactionist, I must posit a fundamental question: What are the behavioral constituents of a negotiation? If the wide variation of negotiations encountered in everyday life is considered, ranging from the elaborate processes between nations reported in the media to the much smaller cases between wife and husband within a family, the attempt to answer the above question would be discouraged at the start in the face of so much complexity and an almost infinite extent of variation. According to Japanese folkknowledge, the essence of negotiation is the compromise that is to be achieved through the persistent interchange of statements with subtle nuances and implications. Any attempt to enumerate the behavioral constituents of negotiation would be diffused into an indefinite exploration of the pragmatic devices such as roundabout speaking, euphemism, respecting the others face, and so on. To avoid this impasse, and to define the extension of the relevant data to be empirically analyzed, I prefer to reduce the problem to a simple model that was induced from my experience of begging during fieldwork. One morning in September 1994, when I was staying in a Gui camp at the peripheral part of the settlement, I was asked by an adolescent hunter to help him carry the meat of a male kudu (big antelope) he had killed the last evening. As the animal had been killed near the track used by vehicles, if I would bring my four-wheel-drive car to a point near to the carcass, he and his camp members would be able to avoid the laborious work of walking a long distance with a heavy burden of meat. I accepted his request, so that several hours later, I drove the car back to our camp, filled with several men and the bloody meat. When the young hunter was unloading the meat from the car, I asked him, What will the owner [of the meat] give me? He just smiled but did not answer. I left and engaged myself in some incidental tasks. About half an hour later, when I went to the car to move it to another place, I found a big hind leg left on the back.
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Afterward, I heard the Gui research assistants talking about my strange demeanor: they giggled, repeatedly quoting my utterance, What will the owner give me? I sensed an implicit criticism of plainly demanding some reward from the owner. I was strongly impressed with the fact that the adolescent hunter merely left a large amount of meat without saying anything. It seemed to me that this simple process revealed the essential features of the typical Gui way of negotiating. This transaction was composed of two sequential pairs of addressing and responding: (i) The adolescent man requested and I accepted, and (ii) I required (in an indirect way using an interrogative sentence) and he obeyed, not with words, but with a nonverbal act. Paying attention to the causal relationship between (i) and (ii), one may argue that this transaction is explicable in terms of balanced reciprocity or, more mundanely, of the give-andtake principle: I offered a service to him and received a reward for this service. Insofar as this is true, both of us behaved according to the rational-actor model. However, this interpretation misses the most important point: this transaction was distinctively informed by a manner peculiar to the Gui participant(s), i.e., the owners reluctance to verbally express his willingness to give me the meat, as well as the bystanders critical gaze toward my plain requirement. My proposal is as follows: it is analytically valid to reduce the wide variation found in behavioral constituents in negotiation to the prototypical interaction in which one party requires (requesting and demanding are also included in this family of acts) and the other party responds to the former act. Although this type of interaction seems to involve competition between the participants over some incentives, focusing on it does not entail the ratification of the rational-actor model. Oppositely, this focus will illuminate how the interactive sequence of the requirement and the response to it is organized in a culture-specific way that lies beyond the rational-actor explanation. As for the last point, it must be noted that giving priority to a culturespecific way over the universal model may arouse the epistemological issue of cultural relativism, which is quite critical for any discipline of cross-cultural study, including anthropology. The emphasis on the embodied nature of human reason might support the strong relativism that presupposes cross-cultural relativity, not only of the recognized world, but also of the recognizable world (Sperber, 1982) because the recognition is constrained by socio-ecological environmental structures in which individuals are embedded, as well as by their genetic or physiological constitutions (Lakoff, 1987). However, the assumption that human communicative competence itself is relative to culture is incongruent with my intuition as a fieldworker. Throughout a period of nearly four years of research, I was usually impressed with the fact that the Gui conversations with me and among themselves were organized according to some intelligible reasoning. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish the communicative rationality that guides the participants in a face-to-face interaction from the strategic 37
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rationality that is based on the calculation of the cost and benefit effected by the interaction. The working hypothesis underlying the analyses below is that in negotiating interactions, the Gui people act according to some logical consistency. I argue that the logical consistency is not contradictory to the embodied nature of face-to-face interactions, but forms indispensable resources for the emotional engagement in interactions (p. 94). [...] The purposes of this article are: (a) to analyze systematically the interactive organization of the Gui negotiations as defined above, which are embedded in contemporary ethnographic context, (b) to identify the types and features of speech acts that constitute these negotiations, and (c) to propose a theoretical model of the speech act that is useful not only to understand the unique features of verbal interactions in Gui society, which has been situated, both politically and epistemologically, at quite a peripheral position in the Western-centric world, but also to re-examine the implicit premises upon which Western thinking regarding verbal interchanges has been based. 2.2.3 Speech act theory concepts and modification for this analysis Three layers of speech act John Austin distinguished three layers of speech act: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts (Austin, 1962). The following analysis primarily focuses on the illocutionary act or the illocutionary force that is exerted by a series of utterances of each participant. Several comments should be made to explain this choice of analytical focus. Any transcription of everyday conversation is the transformation of locutionary vocal acts into literal sentences. The transcription is the only empirical resource for conversation analysis to reveal how the verbal actions of the participants are interrelated with each other at the locutionary level, e.g., the sequential process of turn-taking. As far as the turn construction unit is defined as the projection of possible completion (Sacks et al., 1974), any study of turn-taking cannot dispense with at least minimum interpretation of the semantic content of an utterance that is relevant for illocutionary level. However, it is to be emphasized that the temporal organization of locutionary acts per se deserves careful examination, especially when the problem concerning turn-taking becomes salient, e.g., floor competitions, interruptions, and simultaneous talks. [...] I shall not take recourse to the concept of perlocutionary act. It must be admitted that anthropological fieldwork is filled with countless opportunities to ascertain the perlocutionary effect. As for the above example of my begging for meat, it was very likely that the adolescent hunter silently left so much meat in my car after being influenced by my act of requiring. Even if this is true, it is not a feasible research strategy
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to set the ascertainment of perlocutionary effect as the necessary condition for the plausible analysis of negotiation. The analysis based on pragmatics and/or communication theory has to treat the transcription data as the primary resource on which the researchers immanent comprehension of the participants own experiences and perceptions in the now -and-here context is ultimately grounded. The perlocutionary effect, as well as the participants motivation, which are often ascertained in occasions other than the analyzed conversation, is referred to as the information that supplements the interpretation of the data. 2.2.4 Classification of speech acts as an analytical tool I classified the illocutionary acts constituting the negotiation interactions to be analyzed below into three categories. This classification, which is different from those proposed by either Austin (1962) or Searle (1979), is proposed not to develop a systematic theory of the speech act, but rather to prepare a convenient analytical tool for the purpose of my investigation. (1) DESCRIPTIONS: These are speech acts that describe some matter or, in more abstract terms, the state of the world. This family, also including <report>, <predict>, and <guess> in the cases below, roughly corresponds to Searles (1979) category of assertives. Descriptions can exert some illocutionary force such as criticism against the hearers act or an explanation for the speakers act. If this is the case, these descriptions function as indirect illocutionary acts that may confirm the legitimacy of the speakers direct illocutionary acts. This definition of indirect illocutionary acts is different from the general definition of indirect speech acts that include, as a typical example, <request> with the syntactic form of <inquire>; e.g., Can you pass me the salt? or What will the owner give me? (2) DIRECT ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS: Judging from the propositional contents and the hearers succeeding responses, some acts can be identified as definite illocutionary acts. Thus, indirect speech acts such as Can you pass me the salt? are included in this category. As a subcategory, explicit illocutionary acts can be distinguished. The speaker performs some act by uttering a sentence that coincides with this performance, e.g., refusing by saying, I refuse. (3) OBJECTIONS: Some types of illocutionary acts have distinct characteristics that deserve particular attention. Here, <objection> is very preliminarily defined as an act that casts doubt on the nature of the relationship defined by the opponent party. [...] In my analysis, I will formulate the concept of move that is originally derived from Erving Goffmans thinking about conversational organization (Goffman, 1981). The point is that the 39
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iteration of the same proposition over many different speech turns constitutes a distinct move that affects, with the force thus accumulated, the course of the negotiation. Based on this observation I will propose the balance model of speech act as opposed to the billiard ball model. Embodied nature of the speech act Integrating the diversified arguments, I will emphasize the point that the exchange of speech acts is best understandable as embodied experience. The most valuable clue is obtained from the analogy between verbal and physical play-fighting that was instantiated by the analysis of Case 3, Demanding the money. I concluded that the logical consistency of speech acts, as well as the convergence of attention to a shared frame, is the basic interactional resource that affords the participants the opportunity to emotionally engage in the immediate co-presence with each other. [T]he formalization of conversational interactions is defined as a systematic differentiation into complementary roles of speaker and hearer and their alteration in a relatively long cycle. In other words , the formalized aspect of a conversation can be produced by the consensus of both parties to inhibit IRR, or in other words, inhibiting the hearers potential of self-selection from being invoked. Formalization is regarded as the embodiment of an interactional sense prompting the people to behave in such a way as is labeled as reserved, according to the Western folk-concept concerning interpersonal attitude. It also corresponds to the anthropological concept of avoidance relationship. However, it is misleading to assume one-toone correspondence between joking and IRR. Whereas a joking interaction is a typical instantiation of IRR in which an exaggerated gesture of denial is made prominent, the same responsiveness has to be more or less activated in a serious argument. Thus, the IRR and formalization are not concepts complementary to each other at the same level. Rather, the former is the unmarked basis of face-to-face interactions, potentially omnipresent in Gui conversation, whereas the latter is the marked way of organizing the interaction with the others of any marked category, the most representative of which is affines (/ui in Gui). From this viewpoint, it seems intuitively plausible to assume that formalization is quite affinitive to the ritualization of interaction. Searle argues that speech acts are governed by constitutive rules and are subject to four types of felicity conditions: preparatory, sincerity, propositional-content, and essential conditions (Searle, 1969).
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Systematically criticizing Searles speech act theory, Michael Geis proposes that we replace Searles essential condition with two types of effects of interactions: transactional effects that concern the ostensible goal of the interaction and interactional effects that concern the interpersonal side of the interaction (Geis, 1995:65, emphasis added). Formalization and ritualization Based on the above analysis, I briefly examine the relationship between formalization and ritualization.[...] Goffman defines ritual as a perfunctory, conventionalized act through which an individual portrays his respect and regard for some object of ultimate value to that object of ultimate value or to its stand-in (Goffman, 1971:62). If the other person with whom one is co-present in a face-to-face interaction is assumed to be a kind of object of ultimate value for oneself, all of the pragmatic devices contributing to the politeness or reservation have to be regarded as conventionalized act through which an individual portrays his respect, that is, ritual. This line of argument may too vaguely widen the extension of the concept of ritual. It is neither rational nor necessary to equate formalization as the organizational feature of conversation with rather an intuitive and functional category of interaction ritual (Goffman, 1967). The definition of move The analysis below will rely on two Goffmanian concepts, move and statement-reply sequence: .....I propose to use a notion whose definition I cannot and want not to fix very closelythe notion of a move. I refer to any full stretch of talk or of its substitutes which has a distinctive unitary bearing on some set or other of the circumstances in which participants find themselves......[A] move may sometimes coincide with a sentence and sometimes with a turns talk but need do neither. Correspondingly, I redefine the notion of a statement to refer to a move characterized by an orientation to some sort of answering to follow, and the notion of reply to refer to a move characterized by its being seen as an answering of some kind to a preceding matter that has been raised. Statement and reply, then, refer to moves, not to sentences or to speaking. (Goffman, 1981:24) Here, I modify this vague definition of Goffman more freely so as to define a move as any speech act(s) that affect(s) the succeeding course of negotiation interactions. This definition of a move implies that it is very similar to the idea of hand in a game. 2.2.5 Accumulative effect and the balance model of the speech act To articulate the theoretical implications of this analysis, to comprehend the dynamics of negotiation, it is insufficient to pay 41
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ones attention only to the adjacent relationship between two speech turns that are defined as discrete units. Western conversation analysis has aimed to carve out specific points from the continuum of conversation and to qualitatively describe the structural features of these points. This methodology is not adequate to understand the quantitative nature of the flow of interaction itself. My analysis developed these points into an alternative strategy that can grasp the continuous process of interaction per se. This argument leads to the following hypothesis. When a sequence of speech acts functions as the move that affects the course of a negotiation, this move usually exerts an accumulative effect that is caused by iterating the same act. This accumulative effect has to be defined as independent from the propositional content of each speech act. This hypothesis is well represented by comparing the balance model of the speech act with the billiard ball model. According to the billiard ball model, the hearers mind is moved at a stroke when and only when it is hit with the speakers illocutionary act that satisfies all the felicity conditions. In contrast, according to the balance model, the hearers mind is not moved until the illocutionary forces that have accumulated through iteration exceed some threshold. Strategic organization of speech acts Such an action-sequence exemplifies what is generally called strategy. In negotiation, consistent reasoning does not always mean a good strategy. As when playing a game, it is a commonplace strategy to hold the trump card in ones hand to the end. Therefore, the concept of strategy is not amenable to any tight analysis of small segments of conversation composed only of several speech turns, although such analyses are very popular in the disciplines of pragmatics and conversation analysis. Rather, for the participants in negotiation, the long-term prospect for the continuous interchange of many speech acts is prerequisite to the strategic organization of each participants speech acts. In other words, the continuation of negotiation is the necessary condition for the strategy. How and why does the negotiation continue? Logical completion and openness As was argued previously, an encounter is always accompanied by some interactional effect that is distinguishable from the transactional effect. Therefore, interactive prototype (1) can be prolonged by contingent factors such as the iteration of the same propositional content, an excursion into another topic, the addition of new information, etc. However, the point is that this interaction is logically completed in this prototypical sequence. Therefore, even if the encounter is
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prolonged by some contingent factors, it will often be closed after a short duration. This transaction does not require any negotiation in the usual sense of the word. The criticism of the Western-origin speech act theory is, of course, a relevant issue not only for the foragers verbal interactions, but also for our own everyday communications overwhelmed by the modernity. For this reason, the negotiations in foraging societies provide the touchstone for the enterprise to establish a comprehensive speech acts theory or, more broadly, emancipatory pragmatics, because the form of social life called egalitarianism has generated a unique political system that is not based on the compulsive attainment of definite problem-solving, but on the continuation of face-to-face interactions or copresence. This claim does not imply any utopian image of egalitarianism. It may, though not often, be true that the participants find themselves confined within a situation of conflict that has no room for any reconciliation. The fluidity of grouping in egalitarian societies has often been admired in this context, putting special emphasis on its social function of regulating conflicts. This explanation, which prevails in anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers social organization, has neglected continuous or gradual processes through which the co-presence leads to separation (cf. Silberbauer, 1982). More than fifteen years ago, during the period of the Gulf War, I watched a television newscast one day in which a famous Japanese journalist (also a newscaster) was interviewing a U.S. Army spokesman via satellite. I was shocked by the journalists repeated demand: Answer me yes or no. Probably, idealizing American-style debate, he might have been imprisoned in a folkspeech-act-theory of negotiation that he believed was the most efficient way to attain definite problem-solving. He apparently could not understand the continuous nature of negotiation. I have also felt bothered by too many popular essays on Japanese culture that try to differentiate Japanese-style communication from a Western style, aimed at admiring the uniqueness of the former. I am afraid that this article may be interpreted as a variant of such essays that admires the uniqueness of Gui -style communication. In conclusion, I have to summarize my argument using more universal language. If it is admitted that the interchange of moves is essential for negotiation interactions, it must be concluded that, contrary to Searles assumption, these moves are not governed by constitutive rules. According to the definition, a move can be composed of two or more speech acts. Even if we could identify the rules that make an illocutionary act effective, there cannot be a finite number of rules that govern the infinite number of combinations or sequences of different acts. More plainly, even if 43
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we could establish a list of all of the probable pragmatic rules, we would never attain an absolute rule capable of determining whether a strategy that organizes a number of moves is prescribed or prohibited. Furthermore, no negotiation is immune from the effect of meta-communication. The necessary condition for joking or play is to have both participants attention converge on the shared frame of action-coordination. In verbal interactions, this frame can be maintained by interchanging the moves according to some logical consistency. However, it is not possible to ascertain the sufficient conditions for meta-communicating the joke/play within the language itself, for either propositional contents or utterance organizations. In this sense, as was suggested by Lakoff and Johnson (1999), the communicative rationality is supported by the embodied and emotionally engaged experience of face-to-face interaction, not vice versa. Authors References (selection) Austin, John L., 1962. How to do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Clifford, James, 1986. Introduction: Partial Truths. In: Clifford, J., Marcus, G.E. (Eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and the Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 1 26. Damasio, Antonio, 1994. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Grosset/Putnam, New York. Geis, Michael L., 1995. Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Goffman, Erving, 1963. Behavior in Public Places. The Free Press, New York. Goffman, Erving, 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Anchor Books, New York. Goffman, Erving, 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. Harper & Row, New York. Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of Talks. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Heritage, John, 1984. Recent Development in Conversation Analysis. University of Warwick, Coventry.

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Kendon, Adam, 1982. The organization of behavior in face-to-face interaction: observations on the development of methodology. In: Scherer, K.R., Lakoff, George, 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books, New York. Radley, Alan, 2003. Flirting. In: Coupland, J., Gwyn, R. (Eds.), Discourse, the Body, and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 7086. Ricoeur, Paul, 1969. Le Conflit des interpretation. Seuil, Paris (cited by Noe, Keiichi, 1993. Gengo koui no genshougaku (Phenomenology of Speech Acts). Keisou Shobou, Tokyo). Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel A., Jefferson, Gail, 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking system for communication. Language 50, 696735. Searle, John R., 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Searle, John R., 1979. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sperber, Dan, 1982. Le savoir des anthropologues. Hermann, Paris. Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Sugawara, Kazuyoshi, 1998. Egalitarian attitude in everyday conversations among the Gui. In: The Proceedings of the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference. The Institute for Historical Research, University of the Western Cape/Infosource CC, Cape Town, pp. 237240. Taylor, Talbot J., Cameron, Deborah, 1987. Analysing Conversation: Rules and Units in the Structure of Talk. Pergamon Press, Oxford.

Tem de reflecie 2.1


45 What is the connection Goffmans micro-sociology? between interactionism and

How does Sugawara (2009) characterize negotiation? What can you say about the rational-actor model?
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What is the essence of negotiation according to Japanese folk knowledge? What are the three layers of speech acts according to Austin (1962)? What is Sacks et al.s (1974) definition of turn construction unit? What is Sugawaras classification of speech acts? What are Searles (1969) felicity conditions of speech acts? What are the effects of interactions according to Geis (1995)? What is Goffmans (1971) definition of a ritual? What is Sugawaras definition of a move? What is Sugawaras definition of a statement? What is the difference between the billiard ball model and the balance model?

Test de autoevaluare 2.2


1. The transactional corresponds to: function of conversation

a. an exchange of information b. the interactional function c. turn-taking 2. An adjacency pair represents: a. the smallest unit of a monologue b. one turn-taking c. a two-part verbal exchange 3. Requests are: a. expressive speech acts b. directive acts c. commissive acts 4. Invitations are: a. commissive acts b. directive acts c. assertive/representative acts 5. Apologizing is a(n): a. expressive act
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b. declaration c. directive act

Correct Answers: 1a, 2c, 3b, 4b, 5a

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2.3. Lucrare de verificare Unitatea 2


Analyse the following TV text/interview in terms of the interactional function of communication and interpretation of the speech acts (500 words):

HARDtalk's Tim Sebastian interviewed former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Here is the full transcript of the interview, broadcast on 15 September, 2000 Tim Sebastian: How much do you share the concern of many people in Russia about how the loss of the Kursk submarine was handled by the authorities? Mikhail Gorbachev: August was really tough - you could say we went through a kind of crisis. The explosion in the underpass in Moscow, then the nuclear submarine catastrophe, and the fire in the Ostankino television tower - all this put the spotlight on some poor media management. TS: So the information was handled badly, the information handed down to the public? MG: I think the authorities initially - in all cases, but particularly with the submarine - well actually, things were pretty clear straight away with the blast in Moscow - the authorities didn't give out the full information. I even felt that the president himself didn't get all the facts. And that's really bad. TS: Did it remind you of Soviet days when the authorities used to lie about everything? MG: It certainly did. I'd been through all that. Why do you think I pushed through the policy of glasnost and gave people some freedom? I used to say we couldn't have no-go areas for the public. That's what bureaucracy thrives on - lack of information. So if we want to be free and democratic people have to be informed and should know. TS: So Putin did not draw any lessons from the past? MG: Everyone's got to live his own life and learn his own lessons, everyone has his share of failure and success. TS: That's a very diplomatic answer. MG: No, no. I've already said this publicly. It seems to me that Putin didn't get the facts at the start of the crisis. The problem is he needed
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to intervene - and instead of doing that, he stalled for time. That was clearly an error of judgement. TS: There was a situation when people stopped believing the authorities because they lied about specific events concerning the situation and then people found out that the authorities lied to them, and so the trust in Putin's government is finished, isn't it? MG: It wasn't quite as you are saying. There was a succession of events. Putin made a mistake when he saw that something serious had happened - he stayed put and took no action. Only later did he go to the scene of the accident, he met sailors' relatives, tried to make amends. But he'd already made a grave miscalculation. It seems to me that since then he's grown noticeably older. It's been a lesson to him. TS: Vladimir Putin - a relatively inexperienced politician. Do you trust him to lead the Russia that you left behind? MG: Yes, I think he's making some headway -handling the levers of government, sitting pretty confidently in the saddle. I met him a couple of days after the underpass bombing, and he retained his composure. He wasn't panicking, he was thinking pretty clearly about how to handle it. TS: Something cold there in his eyes, do you think? MG: I'll tell you something, he's different, he's got his own style. He's not Gorbachev or Yeltsin. He is Putin. He is off a different generation He's 47 - and that's quite a change from the old Soviet days. He comes from the provinces, so he's not tied in with any of the old boy networks in Moscow. That's an advantage on one level, but it's also a problem. It's hard for him to get his own team together, he's learning the ropes. And in a country like Russia, with so many problems, I think he should be given time. TS: Putin came from the KGB. And I wondered if you ever trusted the KGB as general secretary. Because I remember from your memoirs when you were made general secretary you and your wife went into the garden to talk about it because you didn't want to be overheard. Did you ever trust the KGB or indeed did you ever control them? MG: Well if you mean to suggest that Putin isn't to be trusted then I'm sorry - [laughs]. 49
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TS: No, that was not my question. MG: Well I'll answer that too. It's a question that's come up a few times both in Russia and here in the West. They'd say to me, "President Gorbachev, Putin's from the KGB." And I'd say, you could ask the same question of the Americans. Where did George Bush once work? The CIA. TS: Director of Central Intelligence. MG: There you go. So it all depends on the particular individual. []

Bibliography (Unit 2)
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things With Words, Harvard University Press, 1975; Crystal, David. Dictionary of Linguistics, Blackwell, 1997; Cutting, Joan. Pragmatics and Discourse. A Resource Book for Students, Routledge, 2002; Nordquist, Richard. Speech Act, About com. Guide; Sugawara, Kazuyoshi. Speech acts, moves, and meta-communication in negotiation: three cases of everyday conversation observed among the Gui former-foragers. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 93135; Yule, G. The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Unit 3

LINGUISTIC (IM)POLITENESS CONTENTS


3.1 3.2 3.2.1 3.2.1.1 3.2.1.2 3.2.1.3 3.2.2

Politeness vs. Impoliteness (Warren 2009) Relational work (Locher and Langlotz 2008) Politeness and impoliteness research Traditional approaches to politeness research The discursive approach to politeness research Impoliteness research Relational work, intentions and emotions

Objectives (Unit 3)
At the end of this unit, the students will be able to: understand and use politeness theories apply knowledge of politeness theories in their writings communicate effectively and maintain the publics face analyse communication texts in terms of relational work

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3.2 Relational work: at the intersection of cognition, interaction and

emotion (Locher and Langlotz 2008)


3.2.1 Politeness and impoliteness research Politeness research has been in vogue ever since the seminal work of Lakoff (1973), Brown & Levinson (1978, 1987) and Leech (1983). This early work is still discussed today and has furthered our knowledge of how individuals negotiate the interpersonal aspect of language to a great extent. In the meantime, however, researchers have developed additional frameworks to address interpersonal language issues (e.g., Fraser, 1990; Kasper, 1990; Watts, 1989, 1992), and several monographs have tackled both the task of reviewing the existing literature and of adding to it (e.g. Eelen, 2001; Locher, 2004; Mills, 2005; Watts, 2003). Not only can we speak of two general trends in research today first order versus second order investigations , we can also witness a move away from primarily focusing on the study of mitigation towards a broader understanding of facework, or relational work, in linguistics. This interest has sparked recent work on impoliteness and conflictual data (Bousfield, 2008a; Bousfield & Culpeper, 2008; Bousfield & Locher, 2008; Gorji, 2007). In politeness research, the distinction between first order and second order research goes back to Watts, Ide and Ehlich's (1992) introduction to the collection Politeness in Language, and it was highlighted in the early 2000s by Eelen (2001). At the moment,

the beginning of texts usually see politeness researchers identify whether they wish to discuss theoretical, that is etic, second order concepts, or whether they intend to pursue investigations of an emic, or first order nature that studies the understanding of lay people (p. 167).
3.2.1.1 Traditional approaches to politeness research The works of Lakoff (1973), Brown & Levinson (1978, 1987) and Leech (1983) are among the most discussed approaches to politeness. It is impossible to give these frameworks justice in such a brief review. In what follows those key issues specifically needed for the discussion of emotions and relational work are addressed. Fraser (1990) argues

that both Lakoff (1973) and Leech (1983) work within a


conversational maxim approach. Both researchers list rules or maxims and claim that interactants orient their linguistic behavior accordingly. Lakoff's rules of politeness are 'don't impose', 'give options', and 'make A feel good, be friendly'. Leech (1983) postulates that a Politeness Principle works in conjunction with the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975). In fact, he claims that the Politeness Principle is at the heart of people's frequent non-adherence to the Cooperative Principle (1980: 80) and that the aim of the Politeness Principle is "to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which 71
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enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place" (Leech, 1983: 82). The Politeness Principle consists of the following maxims (Leech, 1983: 132):
(I) TACT MAXIM (in impositives and commissives) (a) Minimize cost to other [(b) Maximize benefit to other] (II) GENEROSITY MAXIM (in impositives and commissives) (a) Minimize benefit to self [(b) Maximize cost to self] (III) APPROBATION MAXIM (in expressives and assertives) (a) Minimize dispraise of other [(b) Maximize praise of other] (IV) MODESTY MAXIM (in expressives and assertives) (a) Minimize praise of self [(b) Maximize dispraise of self] (V) AGREEMENT MAXIM (in assertives) (a) Minimize disagreement between self and other [(b) Maximize agreement between self and other] (VI) SYMPATHY MAXIM (in assertives) (a) Minimize antipathy between self and other [(b) Maximize sympathy between self and other] (Leech, 1983: 132)

Leech maintains that not all the maxims have equal weight. He considers the Tact Maxim and the Approbation Maxim as stronger than the Generosity and Modesty Maxims, since politeness is argued to be generally more oriented towards the other than the self. Overall, he claims that the interactants give "avoidance of discord" more importance than "seeking concord" (Leech, 1983: 133). In Lakoff's (1973) and Leech's (1983) approaches we see rules or maxims written down which are claimed to guide interactants in their linguistic output. The discursive approach to politeness also postulates that norms play a role when we deal with politeness issues, as explained below. The difference is, however, that the discursive approach highlights that such norms are sensitive to different cultures and are, in fact, specific to practices that interactants engage in. They may thus differ quite considerably (for a more thorough discussion see Locher, 2004: 65-66). The most popular and productive politeness theory to date was proposed by Brown and Levinson in 1978 (republished in 1987). They center their understanding of politeness on the concepts of face, face-threatening act and mitigation. Brown & Levinson (1987: 61) base their definition of face on Goffman (1967) and describe face as "the public self-image that every (p. 168) member wants to
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claim for himself [or herself]". They maintain that there are two sides to face: negative face: the want of every 'competent adult member' that his actions be unimpeded by others. positive face: the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others. (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 62) Scollon & Scollon (2001: 48) have named these two sides the independence and involvement aspects of face. Brown & Levinson's argument is that "face respect is not an unequivocal right" (1987: 62), but that it is in the interactants' interest to "maintain each other's face" (1987: 60). Since people cannot avoid having to commit acts that are face-threatening (i.e. facethreatening acts, or FTAs), Brown & Levinson argue that they work along the following rationale: Unless [the speaker]'s want to do an FTA with maximum efficiency [] is greater than [the speaker]'s want to preserve [the hearer]'s (or [the speaker]'s) face to any degree, then [the speaker] will want to minimize the face threat of the FTA. (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 62) This argumentation results in a focus on mitigation in the sense that politeness is claimed to play a role once interactants consider each other's face and choose the relevant strategy to hedge the force of a face-threatening act. Brown & Levinson (1987: 60) list two main strategies ("do the FTA", "don't do the FTA") and distinguish between off record and on record ("without redressive action, baldly"; "with redressive action, positive politeness"; "with redressive action, negative politeness") strategies (see Fig. 1). The choice of strategy is adjusted according to the balancing of three factors: the value of the distance (D) between the speaker (S) and the hearer (H), the measure of the power that the hearer has over the speaker (P), and the relative ranking of the imposition in its cultural and situational context (Rx). Brown and Levinson (1987: 76) work these factors into the following equation for the weightiness (W) of the face-threatening act 'x': Wx = D (S,H) + P (H,S) + Rx. This presents an abstract way of accounting for the intricate social factors that play a role in interaction (p. 169). Brown and Levinson's work has been criticized for several reasons. For example, the ranking of strategies, i.e. that indirect utterances are more polite than direct ones, has been found to be an over-generalization. In fact, many researchers would stress today that no linguistic utterance is polite or impolite per se. NOTE: In addition, Brown and Levinson clearly describe manifestations of facework, that is the linguistic manifestation of paying attention to face, but do they also describe politeness as such? Whether or not to 73
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answer this question positively or negatively depends on your theoretical standpoint, as we will discuss in the next section (p.170). 3.2.1.2 The discursive approach to politeness research Lakoff (1973), Brown & Levinson (1978/1987) and Leech (1983) can be described as second order, theoretical researchers, aiming at a universal understanding of politeness phenomena. This is not to say that they did not work with naturally occurring data. On the contrary, they worked with such data in order to develop a theoretical understanding of the observed linguistic patterns. There is, of course, nothing to say against such an approach. The objection by first order researchers such as, for example, expressed in Locher (2006), is therefore not directed at developing theories as such, but it is one that takes issue with the name of the theory. For example, Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness has been treated in such a way that every linguistic manifestation that cannot be explained with the abovementioned strategies is considered impolite. In other words, politeness and impoliteness, in their theoretical understanding, cover the entire spectrum of facework. The discursive approach to politeness claims that there is not only face saving behavior to be studied, but also manifestations of face-enhancing, face maintaining,or face-aggravating (i.e., faceattacking; cf. Tracy, 2008) behavior. In Locher & Watts (2008), we maintain that Relational work refers to all aspects of the work invested by individuals in the construction, maintenance, reproduction and transformation of interpersonal relationships among those engaged in social practice. (Locher & Watts, 2008: 96) First order researchers argue that the term politeness is used by interactants for a much smaller slice of the relational work pie, as assumed in second order research (Locher & Watts, 2005, 2008). As soon as the term is removed from its status as labeling a theory, it returns to the realm of judgments by laypeople, and is part of a whole series of terms that describe how people deem other people's relational work, such as rude, offensive, uncouth, polite, polished, refined, etc. This view is fully compatible with participant-oriented ethnomethodological approaches to studying the praxeology of negotiating norms (cf. Garfinkel, 1967). This approach is described as 'discursive' for two reasons. First, the meanings of the first order terms change over time. For example, the connotations of what constitutes 'politeness' in the 18th century differ from the 21st century dictionary definitions (cf. Locher, 2008). Second, even today, interactants of different practices have different ideas of what exactly constitutes, for example, polite, rude or impolite behavior. This is the case both with respect to the different connotations of these terms, as well as the different linguistic behavior associated with the terms. For example, Mills (2002, 2005) reports that the term 'politeness' may
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carry negative connotations for some groups of people, while others value the term. As a consequence, we need to study the practices in which interactants engage in order to find the norms of behavior that trigger the judgments. Here we can make the link between practices and the cognitive concept of 'frame'. In Tannen's (1993: 53) words, frames are "structures of expectation based on past experience" classic examples being how to behave in a restaurant or in a service encounter. In other words, interactants will not make judgments on relational work in a social vacuum, but in relation to their past personal experiences or expectations about norms as well as rights and obligations pertaining to their person. In a process of analogy, interactants will even approach situations that they have never been in before with expectations about such rights and obligations. Such frames are acquired in a process of socialization during a person's life. The discursive, first order approach to politeness and impoliteness is of course not the first attempt at describing relational work that highlights the importance of norms and expectations. As mentioned before, Lakoff (1973) and Leech (1983) base their understanding of politeness on pragmatic rules or principles. Brown & Levinson (1978, 1987) can also be argued to account for norms when we consider the estimation of the weightiness of the face-threatening act 'x', which is, among other factors, based on the relative ranking of the imposition. In contrast to the discursive approach, they speak of such norms on a much more global or even universal level, rather than on a practice based level. However, Fraser (1990: 233) proposed to speak of a conversational contract that participants enter when engaging in interaction (p. 171). He maintains that there are sets of rights and obligations, one of which is "imposed by the social institutions applicable to the interaction" (Fraser 1990: 232)6. In fact, much of the recent work on politeness and impoliteness recognizes the importance of practice-based norms (cf. e.g. Bousfield & Locher, 2008). There thus seems to be a trend towards recognizing variation in relational work, while the differences in approach with respect to first order and second order investigations remains to a certain extent. 3.2.1.3 Impoliteness research It is only in the last couple of years that research interest has moved beyond the study of mitigation within relational work, and has turned to conflictual data. The study of impoliteness phenomena, however, is still somewhat neglected in linguistics. Early research was heavily influenced by Brown and Levinson's framework. Lachenicht (1980), Culpeper (1996), Kienpointner (1997), and Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003) all attempted to work out analogous strategies of impolite relational 75
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work to the ones proposed for polite behavior by Brown and Levinson. Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003), for example, speak of five 'super-strategies' (bald on record impoliteness; positive impoliteness; negative impoliteness; off-record impoliteness; withhold politeness). Bousfield (2008b) later reduces these strategies to only two on-record impoliteness and offrecord impoliteness. First order researchers such as Hutchby (2008) and Tracy (2008) highlight the need to study situated, 'grounded' practices to observe what might be deemed impoliteness. Today, we can thus see both first order and second order researchers tackling faceaggravating or face-attacking behavior, as evidenced in the edited collections Rude Britannia (Gorji, 2007) and Impoliteness in Language (Bousfield & Locher, 2008), the special issue of the Journal of Politeness Research (Bousfield & Culpeper, 2008) or the monograph Impoliteness in Interaction (Bousfield, 2008a). Bousfield & Culpeper (2008: 163) maintain that, while there is a rapprochement of the first and second order approaches (Locher & Bousfield, 2008: 7), there is still considerable disagreement about the basics. They list the following issues in need of clarification (Bousfield & Culpeper, 2008: 163): 1. How to label the phenomenon under scrutiny 2. The ontological status of impoliteness and the implications of this 3. The role of intention NOTE: Fraser (1990: 232) speaks of three sets of rights and obligations: a conventional and seldom negotiated set (e.g. the rules of turn-taking); one that is "imposed by the social institutions applicable to the interaction", and which is also seldom negotiated; and the third is "determined by previous encounters or the particulars of the situation" and is hence variable. (cf. Locher, 2004: 70-72) (p. 172) 4. How to analyze the language and contexts that constitute impoliteness 3.2.3 Relational work, intentions and emotions With respect to assigning intentions to interactants in relation to their linguistic output, we are faced with first order and second order distinctions once more. Brown and Levinson (1987: 58), for example, speak of a 'model person', who acts rationally and thinks strategically about his or her language choices. In the same way, it is argued that addressees recognize linguistic output as having been motivated by such rational and strategic considerations. Once we move to judgments on relational work in a discursive framework, however, assigning intentions appears to become less straightforward. In fact, even researchers who favor a second order approach, struggle in their attempt to establish to what extent and in what ways intentions play a role in the study of impoliteness and
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rudeness. Bousfield (2008b: 132) takes "impoliteness as constituting the issuing of intentionally gratuitous and conflictive face threatening acts (FTAs) that are purposefully performed" (emphasis added). Culpeper (2008: 36) also assigns importance to intentions in his definition of impoliteness: "Impoliteness, as I would define it, involves communicative behaviour intending to cause the 'face loss' of a target or perceived by the target to be so" (emphasis added). In contrast, Terkourafi (2008: 70) hypothesizes that the recognition of intentions by addressees is linked to rudeness rather than to impoliteness: marked rudeness or rudeness proper occurs when the expression used is not conventionalised relative to the context of occurrence; following recognition of the speaker's face-threatening intention by the hearer, marked rudeness threatens the addressee's face (and, through that, the speaker's face in the addressee's eyes although it may also constitute it in the eyes of another participant, including the speaker him/herself); when over-politeness leads to rudeness proper it threatens the speaker's face; impoliteness occurs when the expression used is not conventionalised relative to the context of occurrence; it threatens the addressee's face (and, through that, the speaker's face) but no face-threatening intention is attributed to the speaker by the hearer. (Terkourafi, 2008: 70, emphasis added) These definitions differ from the approach by Brown and Levinson in that the researchers claim that it matters whether the interpreters of an utterance assign intentionality to the speakers in order to arrive at a relational work judgment such as 'rudeness' or 'impoliteness', rather than arguing that (p. 173) interactants always act intentionally per se7. This thus constitutes a move towards a first order understanding of terms such as 'impoliteness' or 'rudeness'. In Locher & Watts (2008), we stress Lachenicht's (1980: 619-620) argument that "[i]f the purpose of aggravation is to hurt, then means must be chosen that will hurt" (emphasis in original). In other words, interactants must be aware of the relative norms of a particular practice in order to adjust the relational work accordingly. However, we also mention that [a] speaker may wish to be aggressive and hurtful, but still not come across as such to the hearer. Alternatively, a hearer may interpret the speaker's utterance as negatively marked with respect to appropriate behaviour, while the speaker did not intentionally wish to appear as such. In a first order approach to impoliteness, it is the interactants' perceptions of communicators' intentions rather than the intentions themselves that determine whether a communicative act is taken to be impolite or not. (Locher & Watts, 2008: 80)

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We thus stress the interactive quality of communication and its unfolding dynamics. The jury is still out on the role of intentions both with respect to its theoretical status in relational work theories as such and its connection to particular lexical items in other words, whether 'rudeness' or 'impoliteness' indeed differ with respect to whether or not people assign intentions to the speakers, as posited by Bousfield, Culpeper and Terkourafi quoted above. What we are left with then is, as Hutchby (2008: 238) argues, the possibility to focus on ''occasions when participants themselves display an orientation to actions as impolite". We can thus, for example, focus on the meta-comments in which interactants refer to relational work that did not meet the norms of appropriateness of a particular practice. The final theoretical issue that shall be tackled in this paper is the role of emotions in the creation and interpretation of relational work. Brown and Levinson do not give emotions much room in their framework, but they mention 'affect' or 'liking' in their preface to the 1987 edition (p. 16) and call for further research on its connection to the distance variable. They also claim that explicit "expressions of strong (negative) emotions towards H e.g. hatred, anger, lust (S indicated possible motivation for harming H or H's goods)" or "expressions of violent (out-of-control) emotions (S gives H possible reason to fear him or be embarrassed by him)" are intrinsic face threatening acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 66). Indeed many of the acts that (p. 174) they list are at least emotionally charged, such as disapproval, challenges, criticism, contempt, ridicule, irreverence, but also compliments, or praise, etc. While some researchers such as Culpeper (2007) and Kienpointner9 (2008) have mentioned the importance of emotions, Spencer-Oatey (2005) seems to be the politeness researcher who stresses emotions most in her framework of rapport management as she explicitly links the linguistic considerations to a psychological background. In order to show how she does this, her framework will be very briefly introduced. Spencer-Oatey (2005) argues that [r]apport refers to the relative harmony and smoothness of relations between people, and rapport management refers to the management (or mismanagement) of relations between people. (Spencer-Oatey, 2005: 96; author's emphasis) Rapport management is thus closely related to relational work, and we would posit that the terms can be used interchangeably10 (cf. Locher, 2008 for a comparison). Both terms refer to behavior that is not only face-enhancing, but can also be face-maintaining, or face-damaging (cf. Spencer-Oatey, 2005: 96). Like the discursive approach to relational work, SpencerOatey is also interested in perceptions and judgments by interactants on relational work. She argues that there are three key
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elements at the basis of such judgments: "behavioural expectations, face sensitivities and interactional wants" (SpencerOatey, 2005: 96). The behavioral expectations can be linked to the notion of frame previously discussed and stem from the interactants' beliefs about "what is prescribed, what is permitted and what is proscribed" in a particular social practice (2005: 97). 'Interactional wants' refer to the local goals that emerge in interaction and that are negotiated on the spot, while 'face sensitivities' can be related to the rights and obligations that a person expects to be granted/given in a particular practice. With respect to this latter complex, we should not see face as static, but as emerging in interaction (cf. Goffman's notion of face, as discussed in Locher, 2008). In this way, the concept of face can be linked to identity a notion that is in turn understood as dynamic and constructed rather then pre-determined (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), since we can speak of many different faces that interactants negotiate in interaction. What we find, then, is an intricate interweaving of social dynamics: people judge relational work with respect to social norms, including expectations about rights and obligations that are (175) claimed by individuals in particular practices. NOTE: Kienpointener (2008: 246) argues that "apart from factors such as power, distance and rank of imposition, the emotional relationship between the interlocutors, too, plays a decisive role, influencing the cooperative or competitive climate of the ongoing interaction. This has rightly been stressed by Watts (2003: 96-97)". The final step in this reasoning is to claim that it matters to people on an emotional level whether their attempts at identity construction are approved of or not. Spencer-Oatey succinctly (2007) describes this connection between face and emotions as follows: [F]ace is associated with affective sensitivity. Goffman (1967), Brown & Levinson (1978/1987) and many other face theorists all agree that face is a vulnerable phenomenon, and hence associated with emotional reactions. Goffman (1967: 6) explains it as follows: ''If the encounter sustains an image of him that he has long taken for granted, he probably will have few feelings about the matter. If events establish a face for him that is better than he might have expected, he is likely to 'feel good'; if his ordinary expectations are not fulfilled, one expects that he will 'feel bad' or 'feel hurt'. (Spencer-Oatey, 2007: 644) Such considerations are at the heart of comments made on the markedness of relational work. In Locher and Watts (2005) a line of argumentation is pursued, originally initiated by Watts (e.g., 1989, 1992), which claims that people judge social behavior positively, negatively or neutrally with respect to appropriateness. It was then claimed that positively marked relational work could be interpreted 79
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as, for example, 'polite' (face-enhancing), while negatively marked relational work might be labeled 'impolite' (face-challenging or face damaging). This argument is in line with research on emotions in the field of Discursive Psychology (for a concise overview see Edwards, 2005). For instance, Edwards (1997) claims that Emotion discourse is an integral feature of talk about events, mental states, mind and body, personal dispositions, and social relations. [] Emotion categories are used in assigning causes and motives to actions, in blamings, excuses, and accounts. (Edwards, 1997: 170) In Locher & Watts (2005) it was also argued that there is relational work that is appropriate to a particular practice but not marked as such (face-maintaining, politic). These values are indeed to be understood with emotional reactions in mind, as outlined in Spencer-Oatey's description quoted above. Examples of such emotional reactions can be listed as follows: Emotional reactions (own and other) Joy contentment/pleasure pride Surprise surprise/amazement Anger irritation/annoyance frustration disgust/disapproval Sadness disappointment/displeasure embarrassment/insult/humilitation shame/guilt

(from "Fig. 3. The Base of Dynamic Perceptions of Rapport", (Spencer-Oatey, 2005:116) (p. 176) From Damasio's (1994, 1999, 2004) neuropsychological perspective, emotional reactions must be seen as: [] bioregulatory reactions that aim at promoting, directly or indirectly, the sort of physiological states that secure not just survival but survival regulated into the range that we, conscious and thinking creatures, identify with well-being. (Damasio, 2004: 50) Thus emotions are internally represented value categories that can be perceived subjectively and expressed to interactants. Having a primarily evaluative function, emotional categories allow human beings to define their subjective relationship to their world of experience including their social environments. In line with Schwarz-Friesel (2007: 67), emotions help us (1) to position ourselves to other people, objects, states, and events (e.g., love, hate, envy, jealousy, sympathy, empathy), (2) to evaluate our proprioceptively perceived selves (e.g., shame, regret, pride), (3) to react to situational factors (e.g., happiness, anger, mourning), and (4) to determine our orientation towards and our engagement with our world (e.g., fear, panic, lust). All of these dimensions also play a quintessential role with regard to relational work: the display of emotional states allows the interactants to signal their evaluation
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of both the transactional state of the shared practice as well as the ongoing linguistic negotiation of their social relationship. Thus, since the concept of 'face' is directly linked to an evaluative classification, the (linguistic) expression, description and negation of face needs through relational work strategies must be tightly coupled with emotional display. Thus, face enhancing strategies or face-challenging / damaging FTAs must be coupled with (the expression of) emotions that support the feeling of being accepted or not (e.g., love, hate, happiness, shame, pride), while facechallenging and face-damaging expressions are very likely to be associated with emotions that evaluate one's engagement with the world as being thwarted (e.g. anger, envy, jealousy). Accordingly, it is to be expected that first order judgments such as 'polite' or 'rude' can predominantly be linked to particular emotional reactions (other than merely stating that they are negative or positive), but this link still needs to be empirically explored. As a potential starting point, we see fruitful but so far underexplored links between relational work, impoliteness research in particular, and research on emotions in the field of conflict communication (e.g., Guerrero & La Valley, 2006; Jones, 2000). Alternative interdisciplinary research perspectives are pointed to by Metts & Planalp (2002): they see links between linguistics and philosophy, which also recognizes that emotions are a source of values (344), history, which investigates the changing ways of communicating emotions over time (344), and sociology, which places shame "at the crux of micro- and macro processes in social control and conformity" (345). In actual communication, emotions can be expressed on three levels: (1) perceptible bodily symptoms such as sweating, blushing, turning pale (p. 177), (2) non-verbal expressions such as facial expressions or gestures, and (3) verbally through intonation, interjections, emotion words, style differences, expressive speech acts, etc. (cf. Schwarz-Friesel, 2007, Ch. 5). From the perspective of first order research, these forms of emotional expression cannot be assumed to be universally and statically coupled with politeness judgments. Rather these associations are in flux and bound to the concrete discursive environments in which they occur. Concrete emotional display and meta-comments on social and emotional behavior in actual discourse, e.g. conflict communication, allow us to connect emotional reactions with the socio-communicative contexts and practices in which they are embedded. Similar to this argument, Metts & Planalp (2002) posit that [e]motional meaning of messages is a flexible substance that is shaped and negotiated in the moment (the proximal context) and yet built from resources developed by the participants through their experiences, 81
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predispositions, and cultures (the distal context). (Metts & Planalp, 2002: 361) We can thus establish a link between the cognitive concept 'frame', established in practices, and the dynamic and interactive concepts of face and emotion. Indeed, the codification and expression of emotions is subject to cultural and social conventions and norms, which Ekman & Friesen (1975) and Ekman (1978) call display rules. Depending on socio-cultural context and practice, interactants are expected to intensify, deintensify, simulate, inhibit, or mask their emotions in order to behave according to the norms of appropriate relational behavior. With regard to frames, display rules are thus coupled with emotional expectations linked to specific parts of the frame. Thus the close association between display rules and expectations about appropriate relational work seems obvious. Culture-specific and practice-specific norms can become explicit in proverbs or sayings such as Boys don't cry! or they can be bound to more implicit norms; for instance, we expect familiar people to smile or be happy when they greet us or to show some level of regret when we are leaving. So to survive in orderly and face-maintaining or face enhancing social environments we rely on people to control their emotions according the expectations of the practice. Otherwise we would not have reason to ban hooligans from football stadiums because they do not conform to the acceptable intensity of emotional display and behavior. The association of display rules with frames and corresponding expectations of relational work makes it possible to take up again the notion of intention in (p. 178) politeness research. Just as Lachenicht (1980: 619-620) points out that you have to know the norms of a practice to exploit them, display rules equally invite speakers to intentionally play with, expand or violate these rules strategically to create purpose-driven emotional effects that have a direct impact on the definition of the interactants' social relationship, including their contextspecific definition of face and identity. For instance, flight attendants are trained to smile happily even in stressful situations to construct the image of extraordinarily friendly service. This is what Hochschild (1983) calls emotional labor. To interpret Hochschild's analysis from the perspective of politeness research, emotional labor thus consists in stretching display rules for the expression of happiness and sympathy in the context of service practices. The intention of this exaggerated display of happiness is to create face-enhancing effects with the customers. In short, while a discussion of 'emotion' has so far not had center stage in politeness research, we can nevertheless establish quite an obvious connection between the two by linking the notion of face and identity construction with judgments on a person's rights and obligations in a particular situation (179).
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Tem de reflecie 3.1

What are the new trends in politeness research according to Locher and Langlotz (2008)? What are Lakoffs (1973) rules of politeness? What is the aim of Leechs Politeness Principle? What is Brown & Levinsons (1987) definition of face? What are Scollon and Scollons (2001) names of the positive and negative faces? What are the meanings of positive and negative politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987)? What are the three balancing factors in Brown and Levinsons theory of politeness? Why has Brown and Levinsons (1987) theory criticized? What is Locher & Watts (2008) description of relational work? What is the essence of the discursive approach to politeness? What are frames in Tannen's (1993) theory? What can you say about Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmanns (2003) theory of impoliteness? What is face-aggravating or face-attacking behaviour? What is a model person according to Locher and Langlotz (2008)? What are face-threatening acts? What is Terkourafis (2008) difference between rudeness and impoliteness? What is the role of intentions in the interpretation of impoliteness? Comment on Spencer-Oateys (2005) connection between emotions and politeness. What is the relation between face and identity?

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Test de autoevaluare 3.2


1. a) b) c) 2. a) b) c) 3. a) b) c) Expressions of disapproval result in the: hearer/readers face maintainance. hearer/readers face loss. hearer/readers face enhancement. An expression of negative politeness may imply to: give deference. offer or promise something. show interest in the hearer. Open the window, please! is a(n): commissive act. directive act. expressive act

4. I hereby pronounce you man and wife. is a(n): a) commissive act. b) expressive act. c) declaration act. 5. Im so sorry for disturbing you. is a(n): a) representative act. b) expressive act. c) directive act.

Correct Answers:
1b, 2a, 3b, 4c, 5b.

3.3. Lucrare de verificare Unitatea 3


Write an editorial/advertorial/press communique and comment on the relational/interpersonal work you are doing in the text (500 words in all)!

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BIBLIOGRAPHY (Unit 3) Boicu, Ruxandra, Modal Verbs and Politeness in Political Discourse Integrated skills and multilingualism for better cultural awareness and employability, Bucuresti: Editura ASE, ISBN 978-606-505-063-1, 2008, p. 180-191 Boicu, Ruxandra (2008) Micropragmatics of Nationalist Political Discourse, Limba, cultura si civilizatia la inceputul mileniului al treilea , Bucuresti:Editura Politehnica Press, 2008, p. 118-125 Locher, M. and Langlotz, A., Relational work: at the intersection of cognition, interaction and emotion. Bulletin suisse de linguistique applique 2008 Centre de linguistique appliqu, N 88, 2008, 165191 ; Warren, M., Politeness vs. Impoliteness : How to communicate effectively to maintain face, delivered at Workshop hosted by Hong Kong Institute of Utility Specialists, Dec. 2009.

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TEXTS OF COMMUNICATION (II)

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